


crimesmas

by cuddlydreamsonrainydays



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, Christmas, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, a long break, but that's obvious, for all of you who need a break from christmas, heed the tags but it all makes sense if you read it, okay this is a christmas story, they are ooc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-19 02:16:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13113855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlydreamsonrainydays/pseuds/cuddlydreamsonrainydays
Summary: Phil wants to graduate. Phil will graduate. And he'll do well. Whatever it takes. Even if he'll have to be a shell of himself for a while.Then, Dan comes along. Things do not always go according to plan.orHe's a student first, a criminal next, and somewhere in the attic of himself, he'll find this thing he used to be, this person, too.





	crimesmas

**# prologue**

 

It hadn't been supposed to happen this way. He hadn't been supposed to end up here, not like this, not with him.

None of this had been supposed to happen!

He stood shaking in the icy wind. Through every crack in the old, wooden walls, air streamed in. It carried the cold into the barn, under his shirt, right into his lungs, his blood, his heart. It carried solitary snowflakes, too. They mocked him in their dance, and died for it when they sank to the ground and melted, or became one with the ice already there. They fell apart for mocking him, but his frozen heart would not even sense grim satisfaction. No more death. He wanted no more death. There hadn't been supposed to be any death, not today, not like this!

He was furious. But the rage didn't boil his blood. It didn't cause tremors deep in his soul.

He was too cold to shake from it. His muscles didn't fight the ice, not anymore. His breath had stopped being visible.

He stood in the old barn with a gun in his hand and his dead enemy by his feet. His tears froze before they could leave his eyes.

The strained muscles in his fingers wouldn't obey his will. It hadn't been supposed to happen this way. This gun hadn't been meant to kill anyone anymore, not now, not here, in the only place he thought he might feel safe still. It revolted him, and yet he couldn't let it go. He couldn't make the gun drop to the ground with a clatter, couldn't run.

He could see that it was his hand holding the weapon, he could see that it was his finger still frozen to the trigger that had been still for a while now, his palm pressed against the metal. He could see that the blood on the ground wasn't all his. It had never been supposed to be this much blood. Now it was the red of Christmas. It wasn't innocent blood shed, by no means; but it was the wrong blood, and that was almost worse.

Church bells sounded in the distance. They reminded him that time still passed; that the very universe hadn't frozen with him in the cold. That Christmas would be celebrated still, and carols would be sung, and cheer would fill people's hearts instead of bullets. How had it come to be this way?

He wanted to shout; but as the air froze in his lungs, as his heart rate slowed down, as the blood turned to crimson ice on the ground; his very wanting froze as well.

Dan was dead. Phil was alive, though he was dizzy and he felt how he was losing blood too quickly. Though he knew he couldn’t call for help.

It hadn't been supposed to be this way.

 

**# first of december**

 

His shoes were covered in the wet, grey mush that was almost snow; they were covered in this could-have-been that was the essence of all human, of all mundane. It was obvious how the drama of the season had started to get to him.

It was the first of December.

Phil kicked the treacherous gear off his frozen, damp feet. His socks were clammy, so he took those off, too. They landed on the radiator without so much as a second glance, and were promptly followed by his soaked beanie, and soaked gloves, one by one, treacherous like his shoes. His fingers tingled in the stuffy heat of his small flat. He'd left the radiator on.

For a moment, he stood and waited for the cold to drip off him, to burn out of him as his the joints in his bare fingers and bare feet ached. If it took soaring pain for them to come back to life, he would endure it, he had to. But he couldn't help the thought that death wouldn't require as much from him. Death wouldn't come rushing again and again in agony. He closed his eyes. Maybe sleep would suffice. Maybe death was a little much. Then again, what was a little much if the world outside seemed to be ending a little more with each day?

His phone rang in his pocket. It buzzed against his cold thigh, and blared a cheerful tune that seemed to shake the dried-out air in his flat awake, seemed to pump something that could sustain life into the dreary grey. In the semi-dark of early December-dusk, he fumbled for the lightswitch with his left hand while his right fished his phone out of his pocket. ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ may have been a fantastic and seasonally appropriate song, and may have been chosen specifically to paint a twisted little smile on his features, but in this moment, he couldn't be bothered to pick up the call. He wanted to turn it off. To be alone for a moment. Just a moment. He pressed the red button to decline the call, and coughed when he wanted to take a deep breath.

Phil needed to clean. Dust covered every available surface of the tiny flat, all but the bed, the toilet, shower, and sink. The air was dead with it. Dead succulents lined the windowsill in his bedroom as well as the kitchen counter. The plastic flower he had been gifted appeared dead. When those who had never lived died, the situation was serious. Not that he cared about the stupid flower.

In his defence, he had been busy.

He turned the radiator off, and ignored that it was already too late for the action to be of any use. All oxygen, all indispensable to life in the air had been burnt. He couldn't bring himself to care much. Let him wither like the undead red rose on the kitchen table. No amount of bad air could possibly be as suffocating as the hours he had spent in crowded lecture halls today. Holiday cheer choked him in tinsel-covered uni halls, and his pre-exam workload took the last of his will to live from him. Not that there had been any; he functioned purely on spite, debt, sugar and the will to graduate. Death threats didn't do much to him; but they had long figured out other ways to hold him at their mercy.

Mariah Carey sang again. He'd chosen this ringtone to ridicule Dan, not himself, but a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't working crept up on him with every time he jumped at the first note, every time he sat up straight in bed, his dreams haunted by a smirking boy singing with a woman's voice. And Mariah Carey, no doubt, had quite the voice. He still didn't want to talk to Dan. He'd been up for too long, he ran on too much caffeine already, and it was but four in the afternoon. He didn't care to spend his rare afternoon off with Dan, of all people. The boy haunted him enough. His phone was still in his hand, though, and his fingers faster than his overworked brain.

They found the green button and lifted the phone to his ear.

"Lester," Dan said. The trademark smirk was audible. "Happy December first."

Phil didn't say anything. He realized now that the lack of moisture in his flat wasn't only a death sentence to succulents, but equally one to his words. They stuck to his dried-out throat. He licked his chapped lips, but his spit didn't do much good. They'd bleed soon, in a few more hours of ghastly cold and dry air. He could already taste a ghost of iron.

"Wanted to hear my voice, or why did you pick up the phone if you weren't going to say anything?"

"Fuck off," Phil rasped. Dan laughed.

His enemy's laugh was too loud, was too loud every time. He'd only known Dan for a few months, and he'd heard him laugh too many times. Dan was still full of the innocence that every Freshman brought to Campus, and of the hope that taunted seniors with only months to go, who should have been the ones clinging to it. It had been made Dan's mission to taunt Phil, and Phil's to put Dan in his place. Both were working, if only to a certain extent.

If he managed to graduate, if he managed to get out of this hell hole, if he managed to get away from this stupid boy, this stupid mission that had made an enemy of someone he needn't have cared about at all, he would need hearing implants rather sooner than later. Oh, how he would find a way to make Dan pay, pretentious lawyer-boy that he was. How he would seek out all those quiet spots, all those quiet points of the boy. He would find out where to turn that loud laugh off.

Phil held the phone at a safe distance from his ear until Dan had laughed himself quiet.

Meanwhile, he marched to the sink and washed the dust off a glass that had been covered in merely a thin layer of grey since he'd last used it. He filled it with water. It was lukewarm on his tongue and tasted vaguely of old, rusty pipes, but he choked it down anyways.

His fridge was empty except for a carton of orange juice that was three weeks past its expiration date and that he should have thrown out long ago; he needn't even bother check. He left the door shut. It wasn't like he was usually home for anything but a few restless hours of sleep, and a shower. He ate at work; he studied at the library; meetings to consort with professors as well as bosses, criminals and sometimes the three of them, on most occasion wrapped in the body of a single person, were never short of coffee, and seldom short of sugar.

He'd almost forgotten that it was Dan at the other end of the line when the boy spoke again.

"Got your voice back, Lester?"

"You wish I hadn't, Howell," said Phil absentmindedly. He scoured the cupboards for something edible, but there was nothing to be found. He did discover some ammunition that he'd considered lost, but it was so old that the gun it belonged to had been actually lost since, so the discovery was useless now. He’d moved on to better weapons, anyways.

Dan snorted. There was rustling in the background of the call, and someone shouted. It wasn't an uncommon occurrence during their talks. Dan lived in the dorms, Phil knew as much, and it wasn't ever quiet there. He knew more. He knew the exact number of the dorm room Dan slept in, knew the boy had a single room and why; he had a spare key, for heaven's sake. He didn't like to remind himself of this knowledge, though. He didn't like to picture Dan sitting on his bed as they talked. He didn't like to picture Dan at his desk, moaning over law books, or under his covers, moaning over other things.

Phil was good at his job, that was all. Dan's private life, or lack thereof, did not concern him in the slightest.

The line was quiet. Phil grew exasperated; there was not a trace of edible food in the house, and not a trace of a purpose to this call. He hated both of those things. And he wasn't a patient person.

"Why'd you call?" he burst out. "Wanted to hear my voice, or what?"

Dan had asked the same question just minutes, no, seconds earlier. Phil refrained from biting his lip at his own stupidity. It had been a day; a short one, but that was a minor detail, and his brain couldn't function without oxygen, that was all. Besides, he was distracted. He had more important things going on than this call. He had a paper to write for his literature class in preparation for his literature exam. If he got started this afternoon, he might get a head start for once. Possibly, it could free him up a few more hours to spend with his family on Christmas before he had to get back for work. Although, admittedly, this last thought involved a lot more wishful thinking than Phil permit himself.

Dan laughed.

"You wish, Lester."

He paused then, though. Phil scolded himself mentally; he'd been tracing silly shapes into the dust on his table instead of paying attention to Dan, to his tone of voice and the possible implications to his word. Couldn't the boy make it easy for once? He was determined not to speak again until Dan bothered to clarify, or hang up. The boy's phone bill had to be impossibly high. Phil wondered if his employer paid for it before he remembered that he did not care, not about Dan, about what he had to say, and certainly not about his stupid phone bill of all things.

Was that a shaky breath on the other end of the line, or had the boy merely rustled his cheap polyester sheets? Seriously, Freshmen. Stupid black sheets Dan must have bought impulsively and most likely out of spite. Just so his bed wouldn’t be covered in pieces of home his mommy wanted him to have.

"I got you something," Dan said. His voice was calm, his tone level. Too calm? Too level? Treacherous, laced with poison? A boy's voice. Phil had to remind himself that puppies could be deadly, too, with guns in their hands. Dan had three. Phil knew where in his dorm he hid them, and where on his body he carried them when out in the streets. He knew which one he always went for first, and which one he was the most reluctant to give away. "Seeing as, you know, it's December first, and we haven't killed each other yet."

"Got me what?" Phil said, despite himself.

"Something," Dan insisted.

Phil wondered if it was death. If Dan was waiting, perhaps behind his mouldy shower curtain, perhaps in his closet, one of those three guns loaded, his hand on the trigger. But no. The background noise didn't match up. Dan wasn't skilled enough to fake all that. He might know Phil was home, might know Phil had the afternoon off. He might even know where Phil carried his own guns, two of them, and a knife. But he couldn't be here.

Phil relaxed. He hadn't meant to tense.

"What?" he repeated. Could it be a dead body? A charge of murder that he would need weeks to get his name cleared from, and that would have to involve Falken and Berk and contacts in the legal system that they didn’t exactly have, even though he hadn't committed this particular crime? He was better than to get caught; but he couldn't exactly use criminal activity as his alibi. And bribes only worked if there was no higher offer.

"Check your shower. And change that shower curtain. At this rate, it'll kill you before I get the pleasure to."

"Fuck off," Phil said. He stepped into the bathroom.

He needed a piss, that was why. Now that he was warm, the pressure on his bladder grew insistent. He wasn't going to check the shower, not now that Dan had told him to. He didn't follow orders from an enemy, and even less a Freshman.

"Are you just not going to shower ever again, then? You'll reek of more than idiot eventually," Dan teased. Phil didn't reply. He was busy.

"Are you pissing?" Dan asked. He couldn't mask his incredulity. Phil smirked. Who could have known it was this easy to hurt the pretentious law student's dignity.

"Problem, Howell?"

"Oh, by all means, go ahead." Dan had his composure back now, but he'd lost for a moment. Phil would relish this moment for a while.

"I wasn't going to stop," he said lightly.

Dan had to be rolling his eyes. His voice was too level again as he said: "Now check the fucking shower, will you? I have other things to do today."

That noise again. Breathing? Sheets? It didn't matter.

"And you think I don't?"

Phil calmly finished his business. His eyes were trained on the shower, though. Something dark green peeked out from under the curtain, something dark green and something crimson. Dan waited. He heard a page flip, and another one, too fast. He would have bet Dan was pretending to read rather than reading, but calling him out on it was impossible. He knew he didn't care, but Dan would get all the wrong ideas. It had happened before.

He pulled the shower curtain back.

"What the fuck, Howell," he blurted. His chapped lip gave in when he bit it now. He tasted the blood in his mouth.

Dan took a moment too long to respond for it to be natural.

"It won't kill you, Lester," he then sighed. "I'll be present for that, don't worry. I'll watch the life drain from your eyes. Consider this-"

He paused. He paused for too long. Phil took a step towards the mess of badly wrapped presents on a string defacing his shower. The wrapping paper was shiny Christmas-red. There were little branches of a Christmas tree tied to the string, too, and candy canes; the needles were a painfully artificial blue and just about the ugliest thing Phil had ever seen, but somehow, these words got stuck in his throat.

"What is this?" he asked instead.

"Advent calendar," Dan spat. Another page was flipped over, almost aggressively this time. "Don't worry. I didn't exactly put effort in it or anything. I won't be sad if you throw it away."

"Fuck you, Howell," Phil said. Then, he hung up. How had Dan gotten into his flat? His lock hadn't looked like it'd been picked; Dan didn't have the expertise to get in and leave no trace. Not like Phil. Dan was just a boy. A boy who had given him an advent calendar.

Phil wouldn't open the presents, of course not. The nicest Dan could have possibly wrapped up for him was tissue paper, and Phil expected some quite different things. Human feces, for instance. A discarded toothbrush. A piece of sellotape with Dan's hair stuck to it.

He'd been looking forward to a shower, though. Dan wasn't going to take this pleasure from him. He picked the abomination up from his shower's dusty floor with the tips of his fingers. It weighed heavier in his hands than he had expected. This, for some reason, he found disconcerting. He threw the calendar to the ground in the hallway a little harder than necessary. What was Howell's plan?

Just this, probably. For Phil to think about him. And he'd succeeded. Bastard.

Phil was going to take his well-deserved shower now, he wasn't going to think about any boys named Dan, and nothing could stop him, not even the spider on his bathroom ceiling. He was half certain Dan had put it there.

It was December first. There was no trace of actual Christmas in the eternally grey streets of London, no trace of it in Phil's eternally stressful life. Somehow, Dan had figured out how to taunt him best, where to hit him. Phil couldn't have known himself; so how could Dan?

This meant revenge.

 

**# second of december**

 

Phil woke up bleary-eyed, with eleven hours of sleep tucked into the general area of his eyes. They felt heavy. There had been full weeks in which Phil had gotten eleven hours of sleep, and his body wasn't accustomed to it in one night. He had no time to stretch though, or to take another shower to wash the sleep off himself. Things to do, places to be. People to threaten. Money to make.

He got dressed in a rush and stubbed his toe three times before he remembered which books to stuff into his backpack for the day. There still wasn't anything edible in the house, or not anymore, after he had caved and ordered a cheap Chinese take-away and then eaten it all while working away at his Lit paper. He was fantastic multitasker, but far from fantastic at taking care of himself. No food had magically appeared overnight, and even if Dan or one of his lousy bunch had access to his flat, they were his enemies, not good samaritans who did his grocery shopping.

Phil was hungry. Half of his stomach's revulsion could likely still be attributed to the quality of his dinner, but he was eager to ignore that, get out of the house, and profit of the nicer part of his job. Free coffee. Free muffins.

Granted, besides the issue of breakfast, he also had five errands to run before class started and even though his preparation and coursework were impeccable, he could not afford being late or covered in mud or soot. Both had previously striped him off privileges for a week. Which was bad, seeing as privileges were all he had to provide for his existence.

In his considerable rush, he did not keep his eyes trained on the ground in his apartment. There was only little space to cover, and he thought he had all risks down by now, as soon as he had woken up enough not to stub his toe anymore. This was something his sleepy brain might just never learn. Sometimes he was convinced that malevolent elves moved his bed at night. Now, come to think of it, it was possible that someone was actually moving his bed. By millimetres, sure, but Phil was a creature of habit and so were his feet. The stubbing of toes was liable to be caused by minor changes.

Now, in the hallway, he stumbled. He stumbled over something that felt suspiciously like a piece of sturdy string. It was to his credit that he didn't fall. Three years of experience in his job would do that. But still. He should not have stumbled over anything in the first place.

"What the- Oh, fuck.”

It was the advent calendar. Of course it was the stupid advent calendar, the sole reason Dan had haunted his thoughts last night, and his dreams. Phil scoffed, kicked the advent calendar vaguely to the side, which he would regret later when he would inevitably stumble again, and left his flat.

As if he was actually going to open the stupid thing.

He'd burn it, that's what he would do. Just burn the stupid thing, and Dan right with it.

His boss scrutinized him when he pushed open the door to the coffee shop, scarf flying behind him, one minute and thirty seconds before his shift began. But Phil was on time. Phil was always on time. He knew his schedule, and he knew that there were others who were more threatening than he was. Hell, he had only wanted to study English Language and Linguistics, and to not sell his soul. This came close. But his soul and his moral integrity were still separate things. Hopefully. Otherwise, he had failed his younger self.

"Know your duties?" Berk asked with a sly smirk.

Phil almost rolled his eyes. But his stomach reminded him that food was a necessity. And the heaviness of his backpack reminded him what he was doing this for. Right. His future. A degree. It seemed so laughable sometimes, but he loved the countless hours spent in the library, loved raving about his learnings to anyone who would listen and anyone who wouldn't. He loved calling his parents, every once in a while when he could manage, and hear the pride in their voices when he told them of his successes.

So he simply nodded. His head ached softly from too much sleep and too little caffeine. The human body could get used to an astounding amount of dreadful decisions.

Ignoring the line of customers and the girl behind the counter, all neat and tidy in her uniform, he poured himself a large cup of strong coffee and trod over to the break room. These - he looked at his watch - forty-three seconds belonged to him, here, next to the radiator, shielded from the gloomy and grey outside.

He scalded his tongue and the roof of his mouth, as he did every morning. The daily mistreatment numbed his taste buds, which was only preferable considering most of his food-options. He shoved an entire whole grain-banana-chia-muffin into his mouth, congratulated himself on healthiness, and sighed when his precious seconds were over. To work.

Twenty minutes later, he had shot a man in the leg, called an ambulance, collected a document that he did not want to know the contents of, and hurried back to the shop only to drink the rest of his coffee within twenty seconds, now cold, and left again, a different gun tucked into the inside of his jacket and the oh-so-valuable document safely in Berk's hands. His boss or Kyle wouldn't have been as gentle and only hit an unimportant part of the leg. There weren't even any significant muscles he could have torn with the shot. The man would walk out of the hospital later that day, no doubt. The bastard had been lucky.

They weren't all lucky.

"Just give it to me," Phil growled. His throat was constantly sore from his job, from the deep grumble he put on automatically that wasn't his normal voice; he was not a prostitute with a sore throat from other services, although it had dawned on him that what they did was by far more respectable in most cases than what he did.

"Now," he added, when the man only shivered under the grasp of his gloved hands. In winter, he cherished his precautions not to leave fingerprints a lot. The air was cold, yet damp around them. The wretched guy's jaw was still set defiantly, although his eyes were frightened. Phil knew the look of fear in a man's eyes. He didn't enjoy it, but it was convenient. It made his job easier. It had granted him the bittersweet pleasure of fame in the crime scene. All the men and women he forced business with were elbows deep in dirt, and so was he. It was the way it worked. The most twisted kind of mutual respect, and then, every once in a while, actual respect at fancy dress dinner parties, where big words were spoken and big deals were sealed in a semi-civil way.

"C'mon. I don't have all day. I will snap your jaw off if you don't hand me that ring within the next five seconds, although I don't really want to do it, so could you spare me the effort? I need to go to class in this outfit. Don't make me get your blood on it. Bet it's dirty."

He paused for a second. He tightened his grasp around the man's throat and watched panic arise in those brown eyes. For a moment, he thought of Dan. What would it be like to finally get rid of the boy who had pestered him for months?

But Dan wasn't just some corrupt businessman. He was the enemy. Phil couldn't kill him, not just yet. It would set off a chain reaction to great. But Dan’s delicate face would break easier than this.

"Five," he growled.

"Four. Three. Two. One-"

The man opened his mouth and spit out the ring. He gasped for air when Phil let him go. He had what he had wanted; the ring in his hands. Blue with a greenish tint wasn't a good look on any man in a hideous khaki suit.

He picked up his bicycle from where he had perched it against a deserted park bench, and hurried back to the coffee shop.

He made it to class on time, jittery from coffee, but free from blood stains and with knees only slightly dirty. If they weren't, he'd probably have a hole in his shoulder, so it was a  compromise he would have to allow. He still made sure not to flaunt them to Falken.

His professor, mentor and boss didn't ever cut anyone any slack, and him the least. This, he did for a reason, and it was as much appreciated as it was frequently loathed. Phil topped the class. He just had no time to think about Christmas until it Christmas Eve. Perhaps he'd dedicate an hour to it and buy his mum, his dad and Martyn some presents, but that was it. Cornelia, maybe. He had no time to think about advent calendar, or Dan. He was glad of it. He wouldn't cave. He wouldn't grant that satisfaction to his enemy. And he wouldn’t let himself associate anything other than enemy with Dan.

Phil stumbled over the advent calendar when he got home too late at night, having run more errands and having sat through a despicably boring meeting with boringly despicable people. Of course he stumbled.

He groaned, but spared it no further thought.

There was a bed waiting for him, more interesting than some random boy, some random marionette of Coffairee. He didn't need to be thinking about them here, it sufficed to fight them in the streets. It was where they belonged, slaters rather than fairies. It was where Dan had to belong.

The Insomniac Coffee Shop did dirty business, but they did fair business. too. They kept their business where it belonged, and their relationship professional, in their shop or in dingy scraps of city green that no-one cared about and that had a reputation for crime. A justified one. And their coffee was fair trade, besides the fact that it actually tasted good, not like water after a week's worth of dirty dishes had been washed in it.

Coffairee’s business was dirty. They controlled the Underground, the city officials and advertisements down there, allowing no employees of The Insomniac to use this most common most of transport in London, and their coffee was the single worst brew Phil had ever tasted.

There was no-one he had to justify his thoughts to, or the presence of his phone on his nightstand. This was in favour of all the people who weren’t currently in his flat. Phil might have killed anyone who attempted to talk to him in this moment. There was a gun on his nightstand, too. He probably would have. And then he would've felt bad and missed hours of precious sleep.

Luckily, there was nothing but dust and the faintest smell of a Christmas tree in his flat.

 

**# third of december**

 

Phil had been careless. Not reckless, merely careless, but he had paid for it.

Now, there was a gunshot wound in his left arm. It hadn't been more than a graze, and Luca had been content to stitch it up, back at the The Insomniac. It had been his after-class-shift, too, although yet pre-library, and only his penultimate job. It was a hassle to get Kyle to cover for him on a job with a client that was known to be a violent asshole even as he literally had blood oozing out of his arm.

The worst thing was that he hadn't been shot by the client. He'd been shot by someone from Coffairee. He knew it, because when he'd recovered from the initial burn of the blow, and the stinging in his ass from where he had landed on the slippery pavement. It was degrading, the way a shot that barely touched him could make him lose all self-control for a second, and slip where he had been standing, had been in full control a moment earlier.

Not that control mattered when the client he had been pestering about specific information that he did not give a single damn about had just dropped dead in front of him, when his ears rang and he needed to go, now, and fast.

He had picked up his rusty bicycle and scrambled away, only to have his ears ringing more when Berk shouted at him, only to have his cheeks burn when in the library, Falken glared at him with his piercing eyes. He hadn't even been late. His clothes weren't dirty; sure, he wore a girl's t-shirt that Luca had lent him, luckily baggy on her, and had a bandage tightly wound around his arm, but there was nothing particularly suspicious about this. If he had wanted to look impeccable and put together and fringe-lessly cool all the time, he, for one, would have had to grow out his fringe, and also would have chosen a business administration course or something. Not English Language and Linguistics, for heaven's sake. To believe Phil had thought the man to be attractive, once. Had trusted him. Had thought to have found his place in a coffee shop that claimed to cater to insomniacs specifically.

His body ached on the way home, his mind smoked out as it was after every session with Falken that was supposed to help with his papers but only left him feeling helpless, and a tiny bit grateful because his professor was, while ruthless and so unquestionably evil it was almost boring, still a genius. This gratefulness didn't stop him from hating it all on nights like this, when his bike slipped with every corner, and his left hand shook too much to be of use when he attempted to stabilize the wheels on the street. Nights when he’d seen a man drop dead in front of his eyes. There was still all this weakness in him. Weakness he couldn’t hide away or store for better days. He wasn’t as cold-blooded a killer as he liked to think, as he needed to assume to make his threats sound believable, to keep his job, to protect his future.

He made it home without further injuries. It was midnight.

In his tiny, decrepit hallway, he stumbled over the fucking advent calendar while kicking off his soaked shoes. Not again. Fuck this, fuck Dan for reminding him every godforsaken day of a Christmas cheer he didn't get to experience this year, last year, the year before that - fuck him for taunting him, distracting him.

Phil was a threat. Phil was good at his job, except when sometimes, he got shot.

Kyle got injured on errands a lot more often than Phil did.

Phil was dedicated, and he was prepared to do anything for this degree. Anything. He had done anything already, and he wasn't going to backtrack, he wasn't going to think about all the better decisions he could have made, and he wasn't going to regret getting so roped into this that he would not escape. Not until he graduated, at least. There was no getting out at this point. There hadn't been any getting out the very day he realized what he had gotten himself in, that he had gotten himself into anything at all. So he dealt with it, and he dealt with it well, and if he had to be a shell of a person for a while, then so be it!

So fuck Dan, the little Freshman that had let himself be roped in with the wrong people, too. The wronger people! Fuck Dan with his dimples that showed just how much he enjoyed what he did.

If only Phil could have been a shell of a person all the time. If only there weren't tears burning behind his eyes as he stumbled into bed exhausted and smelled the scent of Christmas that wasn't meant to be in his flat. If only there were no hot tears streaming down his cheeks when the blanket didn't fit right and his arm hurt too much to adjust it and the kitchen light was still on and he knew his bills would skyrocket if he kept doing this and somewhere in him something burned, something acid and roaring that he needed to keep locked away safely.

He couldn't sleep. His mind ran, but it ran empty, in circles, turned on the spot, on an empty gas tank.

 

**# fourth of december**

 

It was twenty-nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds past midnight when Phil picked up his phone. He hadn't been sleeping, not even dozing; he hadn't been crying anymore, either. He'd been lying there, motionless, silent, staring at a ceiling that he only spotted flashes of in dirty orange light when a car drove by outside. Cars drove by often enough.

He picked the call up after the seventh ring, weary and tired, twisting his body to reach the phone.

"Lester," Dan said. "I thought you might be asleep."

Phil didn't choose not to reply to this so much as he had to go look for his voice at first, and then drew a blank instead of coming up with something intelligent to say. He was excruciatingly tired in every damned way.

"Heard you got shot today," Dan added after a few seconds too much of silence. His sheets rustled in the background.

This time, Phil chose not to reply.

"That fucking sucks," Dan said, almost hesitantly.

Phil couldn't fathom why he would call, why he would ask this, if not yet again to taunt him and remind him of his shame.

"It's the job," he said in a voice as cold as he could muster. "I'm still alive. I think."

Dan's laugh was as humourless as Phil knew his own must sound, though not sycophantic, not forced. He stretched it out for a moment too long to be funny still. They'd been toeing a dangerous ridge for a while; a few weeks, a month or two. But now Dan kept nudging them to some place where the ridge faded into a thin line over a deadly river. Phil looked for the familiar urge to kill the boy, but he couldn’t find it in himself. Tired. Too tired. Could it have been Dan who had shot him?

"You must be, I saw you at the library."

"You don't even try to pretend you're not a stalker, do you?" Phil asked. He found it increasingly difficult to keep his eyes open to stare into nothingness, and to articulate his words one by one. He was so tired.

"Why bother," Dan said simply.

They were silent, then, with only white noise on the line as a satellite made an effort to connect these two people, these two boys, who weren't meant to be connected, and both succeeded and failed at its impossible task. Moments like this one, between wake and sleep, when his  consciousness was worn to a frazzle and he couldn't distinguish between dreams and reality; moments like this one were when he allowed himself to doubt. Because what was there to save of his sanity? He didn't need to lock ravenous parts of him away, ones that were full of danger and threat, if there was nothing left they could feast on. Zero divided by any number still made zero. Nothing, torn apart by any doubts, still amounted to nothing.

Of course Dan would have that weakness figured out as well.

"D'you open your calendar yet?"

"Nah," Phil said. Wittier responses could have been made, but oh well. He had gotten shot and his arm still stung. His feet were cold and clammy despite the blanket. His flat reeked of dust and mould, not wit.

"Will you?"

"Don't pretend you aren't just trying to trick me," Phil said. Or mumbled. He couldn't really tell what his own voice sounded like. Phones distorted everything anyways.

Dan chuckled. It was a chuckle as humourless as his previous laugh. What the hell had happened to him? Hadn't he been doing this for three months or something? Four, perhaps, if he'd been quick to get at it? He couldn’t have come far enough in this maze to get so lost, couldn’t have left so many parts of himself behind to find his way out.

It was too late at night for this kind of thoughts. It was too cold and too dreary outside to have a civil conversation on the phone with an enemy and not get all messed up inside.

"Oh, I'll pretend I am trying to trick you alright," Dan said. He sounded like he, too, was half asleep, and it had Phil wondering why Dan would call him with his guard down like this. Was it a plan? A rookie mistake? Or could it be that it was outside of work? It had Phil wondering, too, why he kept picking up Dan's calls. No-one would let his mistakes slide with a warning. He wasn’t a rookie. Dan had been right. He was a criminal. He’d made these choices. The level of freedom he’d had to make other ones had varied, but at least a sliver of free will had always been there.

He had the eerie feeling that something about Dan's statement didn't sit right, didn't justify the bitterness it was said with, but his hazy mind couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. He really made a bad student of the English language. And a bad whatever-one-wanted-to-describe-his-job-as, too. Perceptive much? Analyse sentence structure much?

"You still there?" Dan mumbled.

"Yeah."

"Open it."

"I'm in bed."

"Ph- fucking hell, Lester, just open it."

Dan didn't sound as exasperated as his words would suggest. He just sounded tired, and small. Quiet. This was the quiet boy Phil knew he had an advantage over. Not the loud pretender.

"Will you stop calling me in the middle of the night?"

"Will you stop pretending like you'd get a second more sleep if I didn't?"

Phil stumbled out of bed. The cold in his flat was torture. The floor, always slightly sticky for reasons Phil didn't want to know, made his toes curl with the discomfort of it. He regretted having left his bed immediately. His head pounded, his arm throbbed softly, and this was Dan he was obeying to.

He grabbed the advent calendar and hurried back to bed. It was even colder now. The sheets had lost their bare minimum of warmth and comfort.

"I hate you," Phil groaned.

"Nothing new," Dan said. "I have another chapter of this book to read by nine tomorrow, so. Dream about me."

Phil was left with a silent phone in his hand, twenty-four badly wrapped presents on his bed and the scent of Christmas in his nose. Branches of a Christmas tree dangled from the piece of string that Dan had tied the presents to, along with a candy cane, a dried orange and a cinnamon stick. This was- something had to be wrong with this.

His fingers trembled solely because of the wound when he searched for the present with the number one scrawled on it in sharpie. For some reason, Dan had drawn shaky cat whiskers underneath. Or maybe his pen had slipped, and Phil’s mind had made cat whiskers of lines.

Phil snorted. But that was a normal reaction. Everything was funny when you were terribly tired. He'd laughed at Kyle's jokes in a state of utter exhaustion before, and that guy was about as funny as a gunshot.

He unwrapped the present, still smiling to himself softly, and found something soft, something that seemed to be made solely of fur and weird white wool.

It took him a minute and a strenuous reach for the lightswitch next to his bedside table until he could figure out what the hell he was holding.

It was a torn teddy bear. Phil wasn't sure how to feel about this. It was a good teddy bear, soft and brown, a red scarf tied around its neck; a good teddy bear with a hole in his gut, though, and the stuff it was filled with spilling out, white and clean. Phil set it aside and reached for the next package.

Why was he doing this? Why wasn't he asleep by now?

But it was quite simple; there was a reason he'd been drawn to The Insomniac in the first place. And even though exhaustion weighed down his every bone, his every muscle, every atom in his body, he couldn't sleep when his mind kept running on empty, when he felt that even though this was (partly) what he'd wanted to do, what he'd dreamed about, he was reading books and reading stories and writing stuff about books and stories and learning about people through language and discovering new things, new connections every day, he couldn't help feeling that maybe he had filled up too much of himself, coloured in too many of the spaces between the lines with a dull, grey pencil, and when he was in bed alone, his brain just worked so hard on colouring with brighter colours.

He tore the packaging off without ceremony. Out of it tumbled a Five-Euro-Voucher for Coffairee.

Phil rolled his eyes. This was more like what he'd been expecting.

The third little present was a single glove. It was a good glove, nice and red and with a little Santa on it. It was only one, though. Had Dan kept the other one just out of spite? Had he found this one somewhere in the streets? Stolen it, maybe? Phil liked the glove. Maybe he would wear it, just out of spite. Dan apparently had enough leisure time to stalk him, or maybe they'd put him up to the rookie task. Either way, he’d see. Phil hadn't started in his Freshman year with the shooting people and getting shot back business, either. Not even a lot with the threatening business. He was still gangly and while tall, not very intimidating. He'd been worse three years ago.

He’d learnt how to fight and how to shoot a gun since then. He’d learnt how to manipulate words into manipulating people.

When he unwrapped the fourth present, Phil found a single sock. Again, it was a good sock, fuzzy and blue and just exactly the kind of sock Phil would wear - and it was only one sock. Not that it would have mattered much with normal socks, but this was a fuzzy sock, and Phil didn't buy those for himself. They were quite unnecessary when he was never home, and they wouldn't fit in his boots.

He took a deep breath of the stale air in his flat that still smelled faintly of Christmas, and felt calmer. His eyelids were heavy now. He put the presents aside, shoved the calendar to the edge of the bed and let his eyes fall shut. He would only get a few short hours of rest, but it was more than he'd anticipated, and it was what felt most like an early Christmas gift.

He made an effort not to think about Dan as he slipped into the blissful unconsciousness of sleep, but it was, of course, to no avail. Making an effort not to think about something was as good as thinking about it.

Dan was in Phil's dreams. Phil would never tell him that he'd succeeded with his evil plan. But the mere knowledge pained him enough.

 

**# fifth of december**

 

The librarian approached him with a frown and his watch pointedly outstretched in Phil’s direction. He couldn't blame the guy. It was ten minutes past closing time, he realized when he threw a glance at the giant clock on the wall. One would have assumed it was big enough for a student to keep at least a quarter of an eye on, even with finals approaching, even with everything that was going on.

Phil had been hunched over his books. His back hurt, now that he sat up straight and flashed the librarian an apologetic smile.

"Sorry."

"Just pack up your stuff," the man sighed. "One day one of yous is gonna die from all this work them profs give you."

Phil chuckled because it seemed like the polite thing to do. But it was late, and he was tired. His arm had stopped hurting, the wound being little more than a scratch, but his head hadn't. The amount of caffeine he'd put through his system on this exceptionally dreary December day could have possibly killed a child. A small child, but still. He stuffed his laptop and books into his bag, almost mixing up which books were his own and which ones he'd taken from the library. He left the latter on the return cart. They weighed heavy in his arms, stacks upon stacks of pages filled with facts and theories that were too interesting to be crammed between the dusty covers.

Phil suppressed a sigh.

The librarian accompanied him outside quietly. His keys rattled in his hand. It kept Phil strung up and alert when all he wanted was to be done with his essay and his required reading and his revisions on top of that, and go to sleep.

The bike ride home passed in a blur of traffic lights and cars swerving past him. The streets were coated in a thin layer of rain. The cold air bit into his left hand. On his right, he wore the glove from Dan. Spatters of icy rain on his face, rain too cold to bring life, yet too warm still to take it, had his eyes pinned to the sliver of road just in front of him so that he could see at all. The streets were a blur, but he managed to get home and avoid all collisions with buses and cars. It was a miracle and a half, but daily miracles were hardly seen as such.

Phil stood in his tiny hallway for ten minutes with his back to the closed door, breathing into the dark. Drops of water dripped to the floor from his clothing, but moving was hard, moving was effort, and the flat was so dark and cold and stale.

He managed, finally, to tear the clothes off himself, throw them into a corner in the tiled bathroom, and take a brief shower. His very brain hurt.

As soon as he had his degree, he mused, slowly drying himself with a rough towel, he would take a year off, or three. Maybe he could go be a farmer in Canada or something and teach the cattle linguistics. Maybe he could be a journalist. Start a travel blog. Or he'd simply read heaps of books purely for the pleasure of devouring them. He only had to get through a few more months. It was manageable. It couldn't get worse than this, and this, he was managing.

For now, he managed to tuck himself under his sheets without further injuries, and if that was all, it had to be enough for the moment, the minute. He managed to breathe, and considered it a notable success.

His fingers fumbled for the advent calendar in the dim light pouring in through the window. He reached for the light switch first.

If he was going to do this, he was going to do it properly. The present with a barely legible five scrawled on its wrapping was thin and slight. It weighed like a feather in his palm. A note? Just a square bout of wrapping paper? Another gift card Dan would have obtained for free at a coffee shop Phil would never willingly set foot into?

He tore the packaging away and found - himself, perched atop a table in the back of a lecture hall he knew well, well enough to sit on the table instead of a chair. He remembered the day, too. Barely three weeks prior, he'd sat in that spot, with that bright-red sweater on, with that cup of coffee in his hand that some new trainee at work had screwed up for a customer with the wrong shots, and he'd taken, with that book in his hand that was now securely tucked into his backpack. The lecture hall hadn't been crowded when the picture had been taken; and yet, Phil had had, up until this moment, no idea of its existence. He frowned. He shouldn't be this easy to spy on. Or rather, Dan shouldn't be this good. The question was, would Phil have noticed him? Had he underestimated the boy?

It didn't worry him as much as it probably should have. It just gave him something to think about while he drifted towards a restless sleep, something other to worry about than all those problems of the future he couldn't solve, all the tasks he still had to complete or even to start. It prevented him from the nightly run through the next day's list of jobs that did no one any good and only served to make his joints ache and his breathing quicken.  Maybe this could be a game.

 

**# sixth of december**

 

It was a day without lectures, but with thrice as much work instead. It was the kind of day Phil dreaded the most.

By half eight, he was at The Insomniac, late, so without even a drop of coffee, he ventured out to procure some jewel or another from some rich lady or another who'd probably murdered her husband or some other for her fortune. If it'd been honest work that had gotten her rich, Phil wouldn't be on his way to her mansion. That wasn't how they worked.

The sky was clear; it was a clear blue so dark Phil wasn't sure if it wasn't just actually black still. In the middle of London, he counted four stars when he looked up. It was freezing cold. More than once, his tyres slipped on the pavement that may well have been covered in a thin sheet of ice. He forced himself to breathe only through his running nose. Pneumonia now would be more than unfortunate. So would death. He'd rather not. They needed to get on with the plan of overtaking the Underground system. Biking in London was tedious, and in winter, it was worse.

He wore a single glove. The knuckles on his other hand were frozen red as the fabric of it. Phil blew a warm breath on them, but the moisture only appeared to freeze over, and made the pain worse. He kept his fingers moving. He needed to be able to wield a weapon with both hands. Rather sad it was, this journey through London's finest streets, where windows were lit by Christmas lights and candlesticks, where Christmas trees wore pristine decorations on front lawns, and where no-one was outside in the dark, the cold, just yet. Phil's rusty bike creaked on down the street merrily. It threatened to fall apart with every push of his feet down on the pedals, with every time he shifted his weight ever so slightly on the torn saddle. But it sang its way through slow and painful death.

Sometime during these wretched past years, he'd come to like this easy, clear suffering, this painstakingly obvious hurt. His knuckles hurt. His fingers hurt, or didn't anymore since he could barely feel them now. The muscles in his thighs ached as he kept them moving despite the biting cold that tried to keep them still. His eyes ached in the early morning, straining to see and straining not to be blinded by traffic lights when he passed them. It was so easy to be in pain this way, distracting and yet easy to distract himself from. It kept his mind focused because he had to make sure he was; this way he couldn't think too much when he used half of his energy trying to keep upright on his bike, trying to steer with a numb hand.

He reached the large mansion, finally. There were no Christmas decorations anywhere to be seen, here. It didn't look particularly frightening, though. Perhaps the woman simply didn't celebrate Christmas. There were other holidays this season, ones that were equally important as Christmas even though Phil, born and raised somewhere between atheist and Protestant, didn't know much about those, and even though London didn't look like there was space for anything beside Christmas in December. Maybe she celebrated Hanukkah. Maybe she was muslim. Or she simply didn't like Christmas. For her to boycott the single most capitalistic holiday in existence if she wasn’t actively not into the religious masquerade of it though seemed weird to Phil.

Then again, he didn't know just how dishonest she'd been with money, and how much of it was her fault, and he shouldn't be standing there, at her porch, looking conspicuous with his hood up and pondering the circumstances of her life. He, after all, had a weapon right up his sleeve, and another one at his belt, and a knife tucked into the inside of his jacket. His business here was not one of the sentimental kind.

He rang the doorbell, once short, twice short, three times short, and hoped for a non-violent encounter. His bosses wanted the jewel. He didn't want his body count to expand daily. It haunted his dreams enough.

A voice came crackling through the intercom, soft and squeaky like that of a grown voice actress pretending to be a little child. You'd think the movie industry had enough money to devote some of it to the more difficult task of procuring actors that were the right age for the roles. You’d think people weren’t always only in for profit. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Not in this culture.

"Mummy isn't home." You'd think this woman was smarter, too.

"You have no children," Phil sighed. Did she think he hadn't been briefed?

The crackling stopped. Phil rang the doorbell again, once short, twice short, three times short, exasperated. He had a strict schedule and no infinite timeframe for this job if he wanted to ever have any coffee today and go to bed at all.

"Go away," the woman said, with her real voice now. It wavered.

"Madam, my employers only desire your ruby necklace," Phil said as calmly as possible. It reminded him of the time he'd spent working as a McDonald's cashier. And he'd thought those eight months had been hell. "If you hand it to me within the next five minutes, everything will be fine. You get to keep the rest of your stolen wealth."

"He-"

"I don't want to hear your stories. I don't want to hear what your husband did to deserve whatever fate he met through your hands. I am only doing my job, and I would appreciate your compliance because I don't want to hurt you, believe it or not."

"But-"

"Now."

The crackling stopped again. Phil put his head in his gloved hand. This was worse than customer service. He could admit that now, he was in fact the enemy, not only the person with the broken (or already cleaned) ice cream machine behind him, but he still merely did his job. The pay was good, admittedly - he'd go out of uni with no more debt than a moral one to himself. But that one amounted to high value.

He heard steps behind the heavy door, and braced himself.

The door was opened only an inch. A metal chain held it tightly in place where it came to a halt. He saw none of the woman's face. She stuck a necklace out at him. Phil pushed his foot into the gap between the door and its frame as he took and closely examined the shiny, red piece of fine jewellery. It seemed too small to be worth the fuss, but he'd traded smaller. The object was either the necklace he'd been sent for, or an excellent, top tier forgery, in which case it wasn't his problem.

"You're despicable," the woman said when he took his foot out from where it had blocked the door.

"I'd argue the UK higher education system is," he muttered, then added, louder: "Have a nice day, Madam."

She slammed the door shut.

Phil was used to this kind of treatment. Although he hadn't pegged her as the violent type, he'd rather get away fast than exchange pleasantries with those he'd robbed. He hurried for cover, and then walked calmly to retrieve his bike and make the journey back to The Insomniac through London at dawn on a clear winter day. The necklace, meanwhile, was safely tucked into a little bag, made from some soft fabric Phil neither recognized nor cared for, and stuffed into his zip-up pocket. He wouldn’t get paid for this if he didn’t bring the jewel back.

 

**# seventh of december**

 

It was three am when Phil stumbled into bed. He'd already have forgotten if he'd showered if it weren't for his damp hair, and if he'd eaten if it weren't for the queasy feeling in his stomach. Falken had brought a burrito for Phil to the meeting room in an apparent bout of kindness, but then not let him eat until he was finished with his tasks. There had been a lot of tasks. And this professors' part of the library with its heaps of locked doors and forbidden books and private rooms didn't have a closing time. He'd ended up shoving a cold burrito into his mouth, and having it land on a completely empty stomach. Not a good idea. Phil was occasionally plagued by the uncomfortable hunch that a few of his recent ideas hadn't been good. He pushed that aside. Wouldn't it have been smarter to fuck a professor for benefits instead of getting caught up in the evil scheme of the elite criminals, leaders of the city's shady business (and King's College's linguistic as well as literary branch)? Wouldn't it? He could've, maybe. Falken wasn't unattractive. Old, yes. Stone-faced, yes. It was an aesthetically pleasing stone, though.

Phil despised his own three am brain. And he despised all and everything when his phone rang just as he had closed his eyes.

"What," he groaned.

"Sexy," Dan commented. Phil could hear the shit-eating grin on his face. It almost angered him enough to sit up. Almost. He buried himself deeper under his covers.

"Screw you," Phil said, and realized his mistake a little too late.

"With pleasure. Time and place?"

"What do you want?" Phil tried. "And be the fuck honest."

Dan was silent. Honesty didn't seem to be his area of expertise. If he stayed this way though, Phil would either have to focus on the faint sound of the boy's breathing or he would inevitably lose track of the call and fall asleep. This seemed to be a recurring theme when he talked to Dan. It was dangerous.

"So?" he rasped. "What'd you call for?"

"Saw you wearing the glove," Dan said. Phil did focus on his breathing now, Dan's, not his own, and it was a mistake because for some reason, his own now decided to go slightly ragged, irregular. Dan's wasn't any better, but that wasn't his business. Neither was it his business that the boy's voice sounded coated in something thick, something heavy. Something like unshed tears.

"Yeah," Phil said. He yawned. "It's a good glove."

With his free hand, he turned the lights on. Then, he fumbled for the advent calendar. It was so late; it was already the seventh. He had two little presents to open.

It was a hell of a stupid idea to open them on the phone with Dan. It was a hell of a stupid idea to be on the phone with Dan past three am in the first place, or ever. Phil liked the thrill.

He knew Dan must hear him shuffling in his sheets, and must hear how the wrapping paper crumbled in his fist. The package with the six on it was quite large, and soft. It was pliant in Phil's grasp, the way a present from his mother would be when she'd scraped money together to buy him some new clothing, something clean and whole.

He ripped the packaging apart before he could lose himself in the feeling of former Christmas Days spent with his family, spent under a tiny tree and with sparse presents, but with all the love instead. They'd never been terribly poor. They'd had food on the table, they'd had a small house, they'd afforded small pleasures. Phil hadn't noticed a lack of anything as a child, and he treasured those memories. They came to him now, on the phone with the boy who was his enemy, in the dark, cold, room, alone except for the shallow breathing in his ear that he could not, would not consider wanted company.

He tore the fabric from the discarded parts of tasteless, cheap wrapping paper and spread it out on his bed.

It was the tackiest Christmas jumper he'd ever seen. He instantly loved every single square inch of red polyester, every snowman and mistletoe stitched on it in such a mess it looked like the machine had malfunctioned during the production of it. Likely, it had, and the result had been cheap, objectively ugly, and the perfect gift. It was all these things; tacky and ugly and so cheap-looking already from a distance in dim light, but Phils weak heart clung to it.

He had gotten himself into a disaster.

"The jumper?" Dan prompted. Phil hoped it was good guesswork. If Dan was able to see him right now, he'd be able to see the tears clouding his vision as well.

Phil nodded, then remembered Dan hopefully couldn't see him, and muttered: "This is ugly as fuck, Howell."

He thanked all the Gods he didn't care for that he'd sounded raspy and sleepy before, and the tears didn't make a big difference. Not one that would be audible from across the stretch to a satellite and back.

Dan laughed, a raspy, breathless laugh. He stifled it as fast as it had come, but he couldn't tear the echo from Phil's mind, and neither could Phil himself.

He reached for the next present instead, fingers now slightly shaky as they wrapped around the small parcel. It felt like multiple little parts were barely contained in it. The wrapping was atrocious. Phil couldn't have done it any better, though. He listened to Dan's breath hitch, again, and again. Did the boy have to focus on his every inhale, his every exhale, for them to keep a rhythm? Was he crying now?

If so - why?

Phil opened the present he'd been simply holding. It worked fine as a distraction. Three little wrapped bits fell down into his lap.

He deliberately kept his mouth shut, his lips pressed tightly together as he fumbled for them with only one hand. The weight and shape of them were things he recognized.

Chocolate. Little selection box chocolates. Three of them; no more, no less. Phil's stomach still felt queasy. It gave a rumble now. Carefully, Phil put the chocolates away.

He wanted to ask Dan why he was doing this, but he thought he might not like the answer.

"I've already brushed my teeth," he said. Dan would know what he meant.

"Lawful," was all Dan said. His tone of voice was inscrutable. Dan should not be inscrutable to Phil in any way. Dan was a mere amateur. Phil was good at his job, and he'd been doing it for a while. He knew how to read people, how to predict their next moves, and how to evade their hits. He'd been taught by the best and he'd fought to achieve his skills. Dan wasn't allowed to best him like this. And the simple word 'lawful' wasn't allowed to be in itself an oil painting of everything Phil wasn't, not anymore. He'd tucked that part of himself away at some point and then forgotten which storage cupboard it was in.

Now, the silence was uncomfortable. Now, Phil felt exposed, not the way he did when he knew a sharpshooter's gun was pointed at him - there was a thrill to that, even if it was a sickening one - but rather exposed as if Dan could read his mind, see his every hidden thought.

Now, he wanted Dan to back away.

"I need to go to sleep," he said, voice harsh in his own ears, like he'd turned the volume of his phone too high and, blasting through his crappy headphones, every single syllable punctuated a stab to his eardrums. "I got jobs to do in the morning."

He was on the verge of hanging up. His finger danced over the red button. Still hesitant. Still weak. He never could bring himself to let go of all humanity. He'd managed fine. He'd manage another few months. He'd keep enough of his decency to rebuild the entire stock, and more. Maybe if he’d kill Dan, this would all be easier.

"You know you're a criminal," Dan said. His voice was metallic through the speakers, especially from a distance like this, but the words were clear and sharp as blades. Rapid as bullets. "We both are. Scum, dirt, whatever. You call the things you do jobs? We're criminals, dirty scum and the worst kind of people hanging from the highest step of the ladder. You and me both."

Phil hung up. He didn't go to sleep for another hour. He stared at his never-changing phone screen, tapping it periodically so that it would stay bright, so that it would keep his eyes watering instead of the thoughts racing in his mind, and waited until the last bit of battery had died.

 

**# eight of december**

 

The eighth day of December was one of those days that had Phil the width of a single hair from skipping his lectures. All of them. Even the ones where attendance was closely kept. Even the ones that were direct preparation for finals. Even the one with Falken himself.

He pulled himself together, somehow, with Luca's help, a cup of coffee that wasn't so much strong as it was doused with sugar and whipped cream, with some food that he barely managed to swallow and seventeen new pictures of Luca's cat. The girl was new, but she was the lifesaving kind. Literally. She had training as a medic. It insured her contract. They would let many things slide before they fired a medic.

Not that Phil had been hurt this morning. If he'd been hurt, he would've shrugged it off, would've dragged himself into the lecture hall if necessary. He could easily be stitched up, take three painkillers at once and go about his day.

It was worse after he'd hurt. The worst when he'd been forced to kill.

Dan's words from their latest conversation still echoed through his mind, echoed through it now as he was being lecture yet again about internal voice and the importance of it in a story, something about empathy and understanding. 'You know you're a criminal' Dan had said. Phil knew. He didn't feel much empathy for himself, not on a day like this, not when he'd killed a man, even though the man, and Phil knew that, had done worse. Phil hadn't killed an innocent person. But he'd killed the father of a nineteen-year-old. The nineteen-year-old was technically likely to thank Phil. They hadn't been on the best terms with their father, according to the reports Phil had skimmed. But still. He'd taken a life. It wasn't as easy to recover from that as it was to recover from a bullet wound. Phil had done both, and plenty. One got easier. The other didn’t.

In the streets, when he'd been on his way back from the job gone rogue, gone too far, someone had sung Silent Night in a corner, a woman with a warm, raspy voice, one like cinnamon, and Phil had almost cried. Almost.

He sat in his lecture now, drowning in shame.

London got more into the collective Christmas spirit by the second. Shopkeepers were exceedingly nice, if that was to maximise profit or because they had been sucked into the season didn't matter much; decorations and lights gleamed from every corner, every window, every person's eyes.

In a little over two weeks, fifteen days exactly, Phil would face his mother and father and brother as he did every year, and as every year, he'd let himself have what he wasn't sure he deserved anymore. A loving family.

He hated Dan, his face, his stupid emo fringe that looked better on him than it did on Phil, even though Dan straightened his hair daily. Phil had considered tampering with his straighteners, but wasn't that below him? Shouldn't it at least be? A schoolboy's prank, a costume he'd grown out of?

He hated Dan, his dimples and how they seemed to created a hole in his cheeks when they weren't there, an invisible one that was yet all Phil could perceive. He hated how much time he'd spent looking at Dan, and how much more he'd spent talking to the boy, even how much time he’d spent doing the right thing, thinking about killing Dan.

In the beginning, it had been but a job.

Find out about the newbies, he'd been told. Have a look at the weaklings they've recruited this time.

Gathering information wasn't normally Phil's task. They had people with more skills for that, ones who were smaller, slighter, and a lot less clumsy. But the new recruits were no match to him. So he'd found out about them. It had been a coincidence how he'd strayed back to Dan after the first time in his room. He'd needed more information. Dan's belongings had been too scarce, too untelling and plain to be enough for Falken and Berk to be satisfied. There'd been a Muse poster on the wall of his dorm the second time Phil had come, and a heavy law book on his desk. The paper tucked neatly in between two of its thin pages had been filled from top to bottom, back and front, with scrawly doodles. No notes.

This kid isn't getting far, Phil had thought. And yet here was. Wanting to call Dan. For the familiarity. For the comfort of expectations below zero. This was a weakness he could not allow himself to possess. He always had to strive to be not only his, but the best.

In the end, Phil might have as well not gone to his lecture. He barely knew what it had been about. Weak. A page of his notebook was filled with unrecognizable doodles similar to Dan's that day. Pathetic. He'd have to watch the lecture back later. It would cost him precious time. So Phil pulled his wits together, and forced himself to focus. There was no other path that led away from the corpse he'd left in the park.

 

**# ninth of december**

 

Phil woke in a cold sweat.

His lamp was switched on before his brain, but the light didn't do much to soothe him. It only brought out the shadows in his room. It only brought out the shadows in him.

He'd shot the man again, but it hadn't been only the latest victim whose blood he carried on his hands; no, it had been all of them. Laughing at him, taunting him. And then, it had been more. The people who'd been stood in a line became a crowd, a stadium full of faces twisted into ugly grins as well as sincere smiles, and Phil had fired shots into the crowd uncontrollably. He hadn't been able to stop, to tell the bad from the good in the crowd, or even to aim. He'd killed the innocent. And his chest had been heaving with thunderous laughter.

Had there been anything in his stomach, he would've thrown up right there on his sheets.

Instead, he fumbled for his phone on the nightstand. He dropped it twice before his weak fingers closed around it. It took him painfully long to find Dan's contact with fingers that the touchscreen wouldn't obey to for some reason. Maybe his phone had realized how he wasn't quite human anymore, too.

Dignity could go fuck itself.

Dan picked up after the first ring.

"Lester," he said. "Found today's present appealing?"

Phil hadn't thought to check. It hadn't crossed his mind once since he'd gotten in last night after a tiresome meeting with Falken, not while he'd taken a scalding shower to wash the non-existent blood off himself, not while he'd been on his back in bed, willing himself to sleep, to glide over into bittersweet oblivion. It had ended up being rather bitter.

"Haven't seen it," he managed before he didn't trust his voice anymore.

Dan said nothing. His breathing sounded shallow, though. Did he ever take a deep breath? But Phil wasn't in a position to lecture about that. He wasn't in a position to lecture Dan at all.

"You called this time," Dan finally said. "Am I supposed to assume the world is ending?"

There were ten million witty answers a Phil in a better state could have come up with. A Phil in a slightly better and slightly more tired state might have laughed. Phil in his current state said nothing.

"Is it?" Dan asked.

"No," Phil said. His breathing evened a little with every time he forced the muscles to work that controlled his lungs. "I think I'd be calling my mum if it was."

"Lawful good," Dan said. Phil didn't choke on the words this time. "You a momma's kid?"

"Who isn't," Phil said. He didn't care about his reputation. He didn't care that all of this could be going straight to Coffairee. That it could all be one elaborate scam. He'd taken the bait already. Now, whatever he did, there was no possibility for him to evade getting hurt.

"I'm not," Dan spat. Then: "I'd be damned if I was. Parents kicked me out of the fucking house soon as I could sign my own papers."

"Oh," Phil said. Not the appropriate answer, for sure, but he wasn't sure he could muster anything else. He was tangled up enough in this mess. Dan's breathing had no rhythm to it, and perhaps this was why. Perhaps this was the thing blocking his chest and his windpipe. Perhaps this was a maze he’d been lost in long before getting to Coffairee and King’s College. Phil couldn't afford to feel sorry for Dan. A trick. An elaborate plan.

"Now that we're both awake, how about you open your presents?"

Phil gave no reply, but he took the thin present with the eight on it. Yet again, it looked and felt like it could have merely been wrapping paper. An empty day. Phil would have welcomed even that. Maybe Dan hadn't figured him out as well as he'd assumed. Maybe he was doomed whichever way. Yet again, there was a picture in the present. It was of Dan this time.

Taken in low light, all cheeks and eyelashes and collarbones and just a boy with all those shadows on him, all these exposed parts of himself colouring his skin a little darker behind them, making it disappear in the absence of light.

"Artistic," Phil managed.

"Thanks," Dan said. Phil wondered if Dan remembered every present and the specific day Phil would receive on, and then he thought that Dan might be keeping a list. For some reason, the notion tugged at his heart in an uncomfortable way.

He put the picture aside, torn between two entirely different paths his brain might take. Both were bad decisions, but staying at the intersection, looking into both of them, felt like the fatal one. Did he pity Dan? Fear for him? See the shadows that his boyishly sharp features cast? He'd grown out of his baby fat, but not grown into a man yet, and it was so evident in the way his face was shaped and in the way his eyes were so big. Did he look at the shadows, though, or at the features? Did he let himself take the plunge into the darker corners of Dan, the depth of him, or did he look at the collarbones and eyelashes almost brushing his cheeks and find them enticing?

He was too tired to move now, even figuratively, so he stared down both paths, both dark alleys, until they merged and disappeared in front of his eyes, and the only Dan he knew was on the phone with him again, breathing softly. Waiting.

"Go on," he said, then. "Or are you enjoying the view?"

Phil didn't dignify that with a response; he couldn't have come up with one. He blamed it on the time of the day, or rather the time of the night.

What he could do was find the next present.

Again, it was thin and it bent in his fingers. Another photograph?

Phil unwrapped it unceremoniously, and wished he hadn't half a heartbeat later. It was half a heartbeat because his heart stuttered when his brain had processed what he was seeing. It was shock.

"Did you send me a physical dick pic?" he blurted.

"I did," Dan confirmed.

"Is that-"

"You'll never know." The smirk on Dan's face was audible as he interrupted Phil, and soon he burst out laughing. Phil tried his best to keep serious, but he ended up with his hand on his phone, trying to block the sound of himself giggling. He was too sleepy to go around calling enemies. Especially the kind that gave him tacky advent calendars. Especially the kind that dragged the days of dubious jobs and ceaseless studying longer and longer; that reminded him of things he'd trained himself not to think about while he was at university, things he'd wanted to keep safe and untainted, a version of himself he could just go back to once all of this was over. He wasn't at breaking point, not just yet. He wouldn't let himself consider the possibility that things could turn out not to be as easy as that.

He couldn't deny that the mere possibility the penis in question might be Dan's did something to him. He didn't have to admit it, either. This was the beauty of a phone call.

"I hate you," Phil said.

"That's no news," Dan said. "Sweet dreams."

He didn't hang up for a while. Neither did Phil.

 

**# tenth of december**

 

Precisely two weeks before Christmas Eve, Phil was given an early Christmas present of the rarest kind. It was a day of lectures and library solely; crammed down to the very last second, but with a semblance of holiday to it that had Phil abuzz with festivity from the moment he opened his eyes. The single exam he had was a minor detail. Fun, almost.

He pulled on the Christmas jumper Dan had given him. It was ugly; Phil doubted, even, that he'd seen worse in the lecture halls, and there seemed to be something like an ongoing competition amongst the other people in his lectures who could wear the ugliest Christmas jumper. Phil had seen masses of people join in, some of which knew to be Jewish, or to be rigidly opposed to the entire idea of Christmas, or to be the kind to only go to lectures dressed in suits and blazers. It had to be a serious competition; Phil wasn't very in tune with what his peers did, but he was an observer, someone who sat and watched and noticed. His was objectively the ugliest Christmas jumper.

He sat in the lecture hall with it on. Each hair on his arms stood electrified from the horrendous quality of the fabric, and he was glad he'd at least worn a simple white t-shirt so that the hair on his chest was spared. He couldn't bring himself to regret his choice of clothing, though. He just hoped that Dan would see, somewhere in the hallways or sometime on his job, where there seemed to be a lot of stalking Phil involved.

Phil sailed through the exam, relished the lectures, and completed his last big paper before Christmas break with euphoria in his fingers as they danced across the keyboard of his laptop. This was what he'd come to uni for.

A girl approached him at the end of his third lecture of the day, when he ached for coffee and had almost forgotten about his peculiar attire. Her name was Carmen, he remembered. They went to a lot of the same lectures, and her answers stood out whenever they had a group discussion, just like her dark curls did when she sat in a row in front of him. He'd seen her wear at least six different Christmas jumpers within ten days of December now. Not all of them were ugly, but there was still a level of achievement there that Phil and his colourful, but plain t-shirts, could only hope to ascend to one day.

"I like your jumper," she said instead of a greeting.

Phil shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He wasn't good at civil conversations with people around his own age. Had never been. But it was best not to tap into the childhood trauma of a designated weird kid while attempting to have a conversation. It was also best not to let his mind wander to Dan.

"Thanks," he said. "I like yours, too. Nice reindeer."

"Thanks," she said. It was a geometric kind of design, and the reindeer had rainbow antlers. It would have been a classy Christmas jumper if it weren't for the flashing lights all over it. "All about them rainbows, even at Christmas. Anyways, I wanted to ask if you had notes on last week's lecture? And if you were willing to let me copy them? I had to go to the doctor and I'm sort of assuming your notes are the best notes."

Phil grinned. "You would be assuming correctly, of course. I can email them to you if you'd like."

"Brilliant." Carmen beamed and scribbled down her email for him before she walked off.

Phil could have sworn he'd seen Dan for a second, there, right by the door at the front of the room. This was slowly moving into dangerous territory.

For now, though, he was going to focus. He couldn't fall for the enemy's plan in this way. He would graduate, no matter the sacrifice. And then he’d let himself enjoy these things again.

 

**# eleventh of december**

 

Phil was stuck with a tedious job. An all day job. A job that he had purely because Falken was off to god-knows-where and had made sure to inform Berk of this, who in turn had grasped this opportunity to have Phil do easy work efficiently instead of having a newbie do it. As if he didn't have other responsibilities to tend to. Only, he didn't, really. He would miss one lecture, one taught by a professor that was at least three quarters out of his mind, and he'd get Carmen's notes.

He'd had to complain, especially since Kyle had been the one who'd taken over his other two jobs of the day, ones that would have involved a significantly higher amount of guns, and Kyle had watched his reaction like a hawk. Phil didn't like stereotypes, and he like purposely evading them even less, but this was Kyle. Phil may have been able to throw a punch or two, and fire a decent shot, but Kyle had a black belt in kickboxing. He liked to brag about it, and did so frequently. Phil wasn't interested in so much as a friendly brawl with this wardrobe of a person.

Now, his teeth chattered in the cold. Three snowflakes dropped from the sky every now and then only to melt on the pavement, but Phil could have sworn that the streets at this point where covered in a layer of ice. His feet were coated it in, Phil was certain. One of his hands was, too. The other was perfectly toasty in the glove.

He was on stake-out again, like a Freshman. This would have been a job for Josie, or for Max, the Freshmen The Insomniac had only recruited a few months ago. It was a job like the ones Dan would do. Phil only carried a single gun on him, but the main goal was not to get spotted, so he hoped he wouldn't need to use it. It would be embarrassing for a Senior to be caught on a stake-out. Beyond embarrassing. Especially when his only target was Coffairee, and his mission was to figure out the way their Christmas decorations and Christmas menu functioned. They needed to be aware of the competition, and make sure that their own decorations stood out. It was so simple that Phil wondered, teeth chattering, stepping from one foot to the other in the shadow of a stack of newspapers, whether Berk might have come up with the job for the sole purpose of taunting Phil. He couldn't remember ever having done this, but then again, they'd had him in the streets fairly quickly, coaxing and convincing before he’d learnt how to throw a proper punch. Maybe this had been Kyle's job in their first year. The thought alone made Phil giggle to himself.

Phil could lie to other people all he wanted. He could lie to himself a fair amount. Deception was part of his game - it was words and sentence structures and correctly placed questions - he played it well.

He enjoyed the simplicity of this job. The target of it. The Christmas decorations Coffairee had put up were nice. They were nicer than those of The Insomniac. They had fairy lights, which Phil figured would have been foolish not to have due to their name; they had the tiniest bits of tinsel on the counter, and a small arrangement of Christmas greens on every table. The baristas wore Santa hats. 'Merry Christmas' was written atop the menu on the wall behind the counter in careful chalk lettering. They now had drinks with cinnamon and gingerbread-spiced ones, like all coffee shops did. Their cakes were the same as every season with different names and different decorations plastered on them. They'd added mince pies to the menu. Phil had seen the supermarket boxes in the trash can. He was being thorough.

Coffairee looked fairly nice, but The Insomniac could do better with ease. Their Christmas decorations would be as superior as their coffee once Phil and Luca were done with stepping up their holiday game.

Despite his numb toes and blue fingernails, his running nose and the familiar ache for caffeine somewhere at the back of his head, Phil was reluctant to leave. He'd seen it all; their Christmas edition cups had red streaks in addition to the usual forest green, and mistletoe hung from the sign in the streets. The busy people of London ignored it. He had no reason to stay. But he'd already missed his lecture, anyway, and Berk had redistributed his jobs, and he'd caught a glance of hair in a familiar brown shade behind the counter.

Coffairee with their abundant lighting had made his job easy so far. He could see all the details he needed from across the street, or walking past the window with a bonnet on his head, sneaking a glance when he couldn't read something.

Dan's appearance didn't make his job easier.

Phil hadn't seen him in a while. The shadows under his eyes were prominent. He poured himself a coffee, and then disappeared again. Phil felt like he was watching himself from the outside, his younger self. This was the whole reason his heart made to burst out of his chest and run after the boy who'd since disappeared. Turn away while you still can, a voice in his head screamed. But there was no turning back time for Phil. There was only standing here, stuck, between a need to leave and a wish to stay.

A man left the coffee shop. He held a small cup of presumably coffee in his right hand. A child clung to his left. It bounced up and down excitedly, its bonnet threatening to fall off.

"Dad, dad, they gave me a gingerbread cookie! Like Santa!"

"Yes, dear," the man said with a smile. "That's all your cookie."

"Because I am a child, I got it for free."

"Smart little girl," the man said before they were out of earshot.

In retrospective, there had been a purpose to Phil lingering in his uncomfortable spot, one other than that of watching Dan, which was quite frankly below him to do. Phil didn't allow himself another minute. He'd gathered enough information. He was going to get his well-deserved coffee now.

He’d gotten his excuse, and he while he was one to miss cues, he wasn’t one to miss excuses, too.

And he got his coffee. In fact, Luca made it for him as soon as he entered the coffee shop through the back door. The room was nearly empty. A single customer sat a table by the window under a single sad Christmas decoration, sipping at a cup of coffee.

"Your lips are literally blue," said Luca instead of a greeting. Phil gave her a lip-splitting grin. No, really. Someone with lips as dry as his were had no business grinning.

"Thanks," he said when she handed him the coffee.

"So," she said. "How much do we have to step up our game?"

Phil rolled his eyes. He glanced at the Christmas greens on the counter, more notably the needles around them, tinted yellow; at the sign out front where the chalk was peeling off, and at the snowflakes in the windows that could have been made by kindergarteners. No wonder this was a full-day job. Likely, Josie and Max had already failed.

"A damn lot."

They spent the entire day in the shop. Phil had forgotten how much his feet would always hurt after an eight-hour shift, or longer, and how shitty a barista he was under pressure. He'd forgotten how much fun it was to decorate for Christmas, too. It seemed like the entire world was out to get him to connect with his feelings or something. He didn't need a therapist, and he didn't need fucking fate to play the miserable role. He didn't need to drag all his happy memories and warm moments through the mud.

"So you got to change your contract before you signed it?"

Phil chewed on his lip as he tried to tie a string of lights to the ceiling. He was the designated person for the job. He towered over Luca already when he didn't stand on a table, which he now did, and from here, he could reach the ceiling easily. The fiddly tape was a whole other story. And Phil's arms were tired. Two of his fingers were partly numb. He'd burned himself twice while trying to heat up milk throughout the day. One of those times, he'd been careless, laughing at some joke Luca had made.

Happiness did hurt. But curiosity wouldn't. He looked down at his colleague.

"Yeah," she said. Her grin was sly, a promise of how she'd eat anyone who stood in her way. Phil knew this to be true. She'd been complaining for the past twenty minutes about how hungry she was. Nevertheless, she wouldn't eat anything The Insomniac had to offer, so she was obviously far from starving to death.

"How?" Phil asked, incredulous. Another piece of tape folded over, now useless. He groaned.

"I'm a trained medic," Luca said. "Those fuckers needed me."

"You're a trained badass," Phil said. The tape dropped to the table. "For fuck's sake!"

He was tired when he went to leave The Insomniac that evening, and he'd promised himself two hours of library work. Berk's office was the only room still lit, forty minutes after closing time. Luca had run to catch her bus.

Phil tried ducking past Berk, but the man was in this line of job for a reason.

"Lester," he called out. Phil's last name sounded too harsh rolling off his lips. Like it had in all those years of school, when it had been jocks who shouted after him, teasing, taunting the lanky, poor kid with clothes that never quite fit. They'd been Martyn's clothes most of the time.

Reluctantly, Phil came to a halt in the corridor just outside Berk’s office.

"Yeah?"

"Someone been watching you?"

"Think so. That Howell guy? Newbie."

"You feeling pressured?" asked Berk, his head cocked to the left, expression inscrutable. Was he mocking Phil or did he care?

"I'm fine."

"Got your weapons?" Definitely mocking.

"I can handle a Freshman, Berk," Phil said indignantly. He brushed his fringe back.

"Didn't reckon otherwise, Lester. Check out that book I had them put aside at the library for you. Might help you with some lectures next week." Maybe not just mocking.

"Will do, thanks." Phil forced a smile, although his cheeks felt strained with exhaustion, and he wanted nothing more than to curl up in his way-too-small childhood bed and have it be Christmas already, and then he wanted to curl up under his covers and wait, only wait until this entire ordeal was over.

"Dismissed," Berk said. He picked his pretentious fountain pen back up.

Phil shook his thoughts off, let the imaginary blanket drop to the floor - it wouldn't have covered him anyways - and set out for the library in the biting cold air.

 

**# twelfth of december**

 

Phil's phone rang at some point in the dead of the night, when he'd been toeing the line between awake and asleep for too long, and had toppled over briefly to either side too often to know where he stood, or rather lay, in his dusty little apartment. His hand found his phone on instinct, though. His eyes watered at the brightness of its screen. They wouldn't recognize any shapes, nevermind letters, when they had fallen shut, worn out, hours ago, and despite the darkness not gotten a bout of rest ever since. He accepted the call blindly.

"Phil," Dan said. This, for some reason, sounded unfamiliar to Phil, and sat uncomfortably in his brain that was too tired to properly function. He tossed it away.

"Mhm," was all he managed.

"Were you asleep?" Dan's voice sounded weird. Was he out of breath? Or crying again? Was he hurt? Why did Phil care? Why were these thoughts of worry the ones that finally shook him awake? Why did he have to choose a course in university that constantly made him ask why?

"Nah."

"Good," Dan said. "Me neither."

"What do you want?"

"Open your calendar," Dan said. His words were still cut short somehow, like his lungs or his throat didn't want to form them, like the very air carried them carelessly and let the harsher, but also the livelier bits drop.

"It's the middle of the night," Phil complained. "Some of us have things to do. Like not dying from sleep deprivation."

"I could have sworn you spent at least an hour outside Coffairee yesterday," Dan retorted. "And then the rest of the day decorating The Insomniac with that girl Luca. Looked like you were having fun."

"It almost sounds like they don't give you any job besides watching me." Phil tucked the phone between his chin and shoulder as he reached for the advent calendar, then quickly removed it. It made him think of his mother.

"You're so easy to watch, I get most of my homework done while I do it and then have time for other jobs." Dan's words were sharp, but his voice wasn't. There was the sound of page being torn in the background. Dan's breathing was irregular as it was most of the times he called Phil. Good thing the relationship between correlation and causation was scientific, and Phil didn’t have to constantly look for that.

"Your homework must be ridiculously easy," Phil shot back. He thought of the heavy law books on Dan's table, and of how the boy never slept. How his writing was untidy and often smeared because he wrote too much too fast with his left hand and didn't let the ink dry. About how his head seemed to be crowded with thoughts, screaming and burning and imploding with them, like Phil's own. About how it seemed like such a waste to kill Dan. How it might not have to happen.

Dan laughed bitterly.

"Open your advent calendar," he repeated.

Phil reached for the present with a ten scrawled on it in black sharpie, smeared. It was small, but quite heavy for its size. Phil tore the heaps of sticky tape away to reveal a magnet under disproportionate scraps of wrapping paper. A cheesy magnet in pastel pink with a shibe on it. He crooned. Internally.

"Thanks," he said, externally. "Good magnet."

"Dog person?" asked Dan. His dorm bed creaked softly in the background. All the beds in the dorms creaked. Even in those single rooms for students with privileges.

"What else?" Phil replied. Dan gave the shortest chuckle. The sound almost drowned in that of a window creaking open. The speakers crackled in the wind. Dan was up, looking out at the lights of London. If his dorm had faced the other way, he could’ve seen the London Eye just across the Thames. The way it was, and Phil knew the way it was, Dan would be seeing a mess of lights.

Phil reached for the next present. He could have easily opened that before. When had it become a habit to wait until Dan called to open them? Certainly not with the dick pic? Definitely not because of the dick pic.

The wrapping was even more atrocious on this one. Phil tore it off unscrupulously, in one single harsh motion. It revealed a ticket for the cinema, to a surprise Christmas movie showing on the thirteenth of December. It seemed to be a valid ticket, no matter how much Phil turned it over in his hands, checked the date, checked the stamps on it, checked the paper it was printed on.

"There will be something planned by Coffairee tomorrow at three pm at the cinema," Dan said. When his voice sounded choked now, and a little raspy, there was surely the winter wind filling his lungs to blame for it. "You will of course have to make sure it's just a hoax, and a miserably executed one at that. One of those first tries rookies get. Your honour will be compromised if you don’t."

"By you?"

"You guessed it," Dan said. "Go to sleep, Lester. I have a paper to write."

He hung up. Phil only got to say goodnight to the noises of an empty line. He was left with a turmoil of confusion and anger in his chest, and the picture of a boy with his eyes hidden by a dark brown fringe, with reddened cheeks in the cold wind and a little smile on his face.

Fuck Dan.

He opened the next present. It was a pencil. A used pencil. Phil threw both it and the ticket to the movie away, to the far corner of his room. It wasn't that far. The corner was too close to achieve the effect he'd wanted. He felt hollow. Had Dan carved this whole into him?

He never quite went to sleep.

 

**# thirteenth of december**

 

Falken stopped him on his way out of his eight am lecture on December thirteenth. Phil clutched his backpack tighter to his front, then released it as soon as he realized his stupidity. Falken had eyes like a hawk. Phil couldn't bear to be questioned about his backpack now. Not when there was a movie ticket for this afternoon in it, well hidden in a worn book of love poetry. A ticket given to him by the enemy. He was well aware of the irony of its hiding spot.

He couldn’t bear to be questioned when he'd been on edge all morning, all day yesterday. He'd narrowly avoided getting shot again for this stupidity yesterday. Apparently, it was possible that hadn't been the epitome of consequences.

"Lester," said Falken. "We need you at the cinema at two-thirty this afternoon. The one with the obscure movies, two streets over from Coffairee. There's been rumours about something they've planned, Berk will brief you when you get to The Insomniac. We're not hoping for things to go haywire, that's mainly why we want you there, not some hot-minded rookie, but bring your weapons."

"Understood, boss," Phil said. He shouldered his backpack.

"How's that essay coming along?"

"Fine, professor."

"Don't get cheeky," Falken warned. "Don't you have a lecture to go to?"

Phil did indeed have a lecture to go to, and even one after that, and then he had some minor errands to run for The Insomniac that amounted to the delivery of a confidential letter and an even more confidential package. He had no idea what he was hiding in this person's hallway, behind a door with locks that were so easy to pick someone watching might have believed Phil to have a key; for all he knew, it could have been a Christmas gift. Or parts of a corpse. Both were about equally likely. He hated how he’d come to view such a gruesome possibility in such a casual light.

He then had to bike back to the coffee shop through the mush of snow that had accumulated on the streets, and almost collided with a pizza delivery car. He was hungry, but it was a challenge to eat with Berk's notoriously nasal voice in the background, trying to give him information about something he himself was privy to next to no information about. The bagel, specifically without cream cheese, was fully down Phil's throat and in his stomach by the time the unnecessary briefing and even more unnecessary asserting of dominance were over, but it was a close call.

"Any questions?"

"Did you catch a cold?" Phil asked innocently.

Berk pointed at the door with his middle finger.

And Phil had to leave, too; he was, after all, expected at the cinema.

There might have been a second, minor reason as to why the bagel in Phil's stomach just would not sit right. He bristled, and walked out of the office, then out of the coffee shop, with his back straight. He only slumped about halfway to the cinema, and that was because snow started blowing into his face again, big, wet flakes freezing his red cheeks into an icy frown, and blowing into his collar, too, wet and cold against the vulnerable skin. He sneezed. The sudden motion almost threw him off balance, and off his bike, but he managed to stay upright. He would look windswept in any case, and his jeans were damp where the snowflakes melted on them. They didn't need to be wet, and dirty.

Why did he care? What the hell had he gotten himself into?

There was nothing eerie about the atmosphere at the cinema. Everything seemed normal. Everything seemed fine.

Phil had seen numerous films here; they were obscure ones, but he'd had a sort-of-maybe-not-really-boyfriend in his first year of university who'd been a film student and had since become a film student in Germany or something, where apparently there was a bigger market for obscure movies. He'd been gunning for France at one point, but there had been an incident with his French teacher. Or something. Phil had been cheated on twice by then, and hadn't cared all that much. But they'd seen obscure movies together. And then Phil had kept going. They were great, sometimes; sometimes plain weird, and Phil liked weird, and Phil liked storytelling, visual or not. The popcorn was good, too.

Phil tried to think about the popcorn now, but all he could think about was Dan, and he wouldn't even try to convince himself otherwise this time. How had the boy managed to pull off this hoax? Were the Coffairee people in on this? Or was there actually something that would happen? Had he fallen for a trap?

Phil forced himself not to pat the guns on his body with his hands. Anyone watching him would see. Anyone would know where to hit. It was simple. It hadn’t seemed this hard in a while.

He straightened his back, and walked straight into the cinema.

There were people here, albeit few; but Phil would have been considerably more worried if there'd been many. The lights were dim, shadows deep where lightbulbs weren't working and hadn't been replaced.

Phil moved to the side of the room, like he'd been instructed to. That was about the point he'd stopped listening. He’d needed to eat more than he needed to know what was definitely not going on. He looked at a movie poster with only mild interest. His vision was off. This was completely due to the fact that contact lenses were a pain in the ass; it was also highly inconvenient, though, and would have been the joy of any filmmaker. He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets, inconspicuous, one hand on the handle of his gun, and trudged towards the bathroom.

His peripheral vision was compromised, and he was on a job, but neither of those were a justification for the clammy feeling that seemed to stretch from his fingertips to his heart. He knew where the bathroom was, still; he'd snuck in here one or two times when he couldn't bear the running commentary on the movie in his ear anymore.

The second he opened the door to it, though, he was grabbed and gently pulled back. His fingers clasped around his gun.

He startled, but he'd been tense before and the firm grasp on his arm hadn't come as a huge surprise. Mostly, he was dumbfounded by how gently he was pulled away from the promise of a sink and a mirror and into one of those corner's that were a horny teenager's dreams.

Then, he stood in the dark, and could tell by the shaky breathing of the person next to him that it was Dan who had pulled him here, even though half blind as he was, he couldn't have made his features out clearly enough to be sure in the dark. Why was his breathing shaky, uneven?

"Hey," Dan said. He coughed, a hollow sound stifled by what Phil assumed to be his sleeve. There were no hands on his arm anymore.

Phil could have bolted easily. He waited.

"Are you alone?" Dan asked, finally.

"Yes," Phil said. "You?"

These questions might have been 'how are you?' in a different life.

"Yeah," Dan said.

"What strings did you pull?" Phil asked, curious despite himself and despite all reason. Dan was too close to him. Phil could sense the warmth radiating from his body.

"Honestly? None," Dan said. "Happy coincidences."

Phil could have bolted, and now there was the added factor that he should have bolted. Because if Coffairee were sending Dan to distract Phil, planting elaborate though incongruous rumours that had reached Falken and Berk, and generally putting all this effort in something that was a mere tickle to The Insomniac's schedule, the tickle was but the distraction. There had to be something big happening. Something that Phil had a realistic chance of helping with as a senior member, if not the most ruthless one.

He waited.

"So," Dan said.

"So," Phil repeated.

Dan placed his hand on Phil's arm again. Phil shook it off.

"Listen," he said. "This is mental. Whatever this is, I'm mental for going along with it."

"Guess so," Dan said. His voice was even, he had that under control, but Phil was used to the sound of his breaths, was used to the little hitches in their rhythm, the little breaks of it, and now Dan was so close that he could almost feel the warm air against his skin when it left Dan's mouth. He could tell the boy was a nervous wreck.

Sadly, his own heart rate was just as sure a tell for the same thing.

"Are you going to kill me?"

"Some day I may," Dan said. “Criminal, remember?”

"Not the good answer."

"But the real one."

"And today?" Phil asked, uncertain why he was asking, uncertain why he was still here, uncertain what the point of this conversation was and whether he liked it or not. He was fairly sure he didn't like it.

"Today I want you to watch a movie with me."

Phil decided not to question that statement, as wrong as it sounded, as boyish and small as Dan's voice had gone. Phil had power here, he realised. He should never have forgotten, but that was beside the point. He was older than Dan. He was more experienced. And he was armed.

He could have bolted, he should have bolted; but he didn't want to. As much as it hurt him to admit it, as much as he was scared, terrified to do it, to have his loyalties compromised, because that was what this was, he wanted to watch a movie with Dan. He didn't feel like a fight. And if it meant he had to pretend to fall for the hoax. It was better than to admit he might be falling for Dan.

And he was. He felt reminded of his slip on the snow outside. This time, he wouldn't regain his balance. He didn't have the strength to attempt to. But these were dangerous thoughts. He couldn't believe himself to be at the end of his reserves. He needed to last.

Abort. There were things he needed to see to. Right now.

"If you want me to see the movie, you're going to have to let me go to the bathroom to fix my contact lens."

"Um," Dan said. He took a step back, then seemed to regret it and stepped forward again.

His hand found Phil's arm. He grabbed it, but his fingers didn't clasp around it as tightly anymore. Phil let him grasp it this time. Maybe, he thought, when Dan had held his arm earlier, he hadn't held it merely to detain Phil. Maybe he'd held on for himself, too. "Sure?"

"Good," Phil said, and walked away.

If Dan had to destroy his carefully created plans, had to hijack them and lead them into the turbulence that Phil had been so cautious to avoid, Phil wasn't about to make it easy for him. So Dan had taken control of part of his heart. So he'd let himself be beguiled into stupid decisions by a stupid Freshman with a stupid advent calendar and a stupid tendency to stalk Phil and figure out where to hit. So Dan had a head start. Two could play a game.

Dan followed him to the bathroom, trailing two steps behind. Phil ignored him as he sorted himself out; contact lens back in properly; fringe, checked. He was calmer now, but his own heart wasn't fooled by his cool demeanour. It raced on. What prize was he gunning for in this competition? This wasn't the lane he'd promised himself to keep to.

Dan cleared his throat.

"Movie?"

Phil nodded. And smiled. Shit.

This was a job for Dan. Coffairee had probably paid for their tickets. It was a job for Phil, too; but if he had switched his work mind on right then, he would've had to be out of this queue, out of this theatre, out of this soft, plush seat, within seconds, back in the biting winter air, on the streets that were slippery with snow and shards of ice, on his bike, off to a fight that likely involved guns. And where guns were involved, death was involved. Phil had no business with death, not yet. Members of his team didn’t deserve to have business with death because of him.

And yet he stayed, hands clasped tightly around the armrests of his cushioned chair, as a movie began to play. He hadn't thought to ask what film it was; and he didn't think to ask now, when Dan's fingers closed around his own tentatively. It was a Christmas movie of some kind, a French one judging by the language. Phil couldn’t be bothered to read the subtitles. Not when Dan’s hand was on his.

Phil felt like a middle schooler. His breath hitched in his throat at the touch, innocent as it was, hidden as they were in the dark. Dan trembled.

This was brand new territory for both of them. Nobody was in the lead, or in control.

Nobody.

Phil laced his fingers into Dan's.

They were not middle schoolers, after all. And if Phil was going to ruin his perfect grades, suboptimal but at this point plain inevitable job, and his pristine record this short of a time before he was to hold his diploma in his hands, he wanted the reward.

Dan's fingers were warm. His skin was soft against Phil's. He trembled.

Phil wanted to make it okay as some woman cried out on the screen in some language he didn't think he'd ever heard before. That wasn’t French anymore. But he couldn't. There was no way to make this okay, or to make this work. It was the beginning of doom, but the kind of beginning with a door firmly shut and bolted in your back.

Phil closed his eyes. From behind the lids, he could see the colours of the movie shifting, warm to cold to warm, blue to green to red hues. He found himself picturing Dan's lips, always a little chapped, especially now, in December, those lips that the boy chewed on relentlessly. He found himself wanting to know what they would feel like pressed against his own lips.

Phil swallowed hard, and opened his eyes.

On the big screen, two people were kissing.

Dan squeezed his hand. Once, twice, three times.

Phil sat paralysed.

Then, Dan's breath, still uneven, brushed Phil's face like a ghost, and his hand, still trembling, cupped Phil's cheek. Then, Dan's lips were on his, a butterfly touch, barely more solid than his breath.

Then, Dan was gone.

It had happened too fast. Too abruptly. Phil had let himself go for a moment, had lost himself for a moment, had forgotten all he'd learned, all he'd been lectured about outside of university for the past three years, his training, his countless hours of being chastised by Berk, being bullied into constant vigilance by Kyle and his black belt in kickboxing; he'd forgotten all, and he'd been a boy again. Just a boy. He'd caught the scent of his hometown although he knew that it couldn't be, and he'd caught the familiar scent of coffee shop and library, Dan, and all rational thinking had been abolished.

Now, he sat alone in the dark. The hint of something wet was on Phil's fingers where he'd reached out to touch Dan's face.

Tears. Dan's tears.

The trembling made sense now. But the sense was terrible.

Phil wanted to rewind time; to undo this realization, undo this entire bizarre relationship that had formed between them, undo it all, start again, start somewhere new, somewhere fresh, and less ambitious. Settle for less. No-one had told him in school that big dreams meant mornings were agony.

This was a morning after a restless night; a dawn that brought but bad news and a piercing headache.

Phil's phone vibrated against his thigh.

Shit shit shit. Shit!

The message was from Dan.

'i'm sorry'

 

**# fourteenth of december**

 

The man's nose cracked under his knuckles. Phil threw another jab, then a punch, just to be sure, but the man cowered in front of him already. Phil hadn't bothered to remember his name, or to care for vital organs and their remaining intact when he'd placed hard roundhouse kicks in quick succession the minute the man had so much as threatened to use his fists. He wrenched the parcel from the poor sucker's left hand, and left him on the icy ground.

Blood stained Phil's fingers, dried from earlier, and fresh from where it had spilled from the man's nose in gushes. There were drops of it on the parcel, but Phil doubted that Berk would have expected otherwise.

Phil liked the blood stains. It kept the memories of tears on them at bay that had plagued him for a full day and night. He itched to pull the skin off his lips. Instead, he picked up his squeaky bicycle and hurried back to The Insomniac, parcel tucked under his arm. He didn't care for what was inside.

Kyle had been badly injured in yesterday's brawl. Yesterday's brawl that Phil could have been helpful in, even if it had taken hours and hours of practise to teach him the basics of kickboxing, even if it had taken hours and hours of lessons in shooting for him to become handy with a gun. He was, now. He'd acquired those skills. They hadn't managed to obliterate the fact that he was an utter buffoon. Gullible, and trusting still, and the reason The Insomniac had taken a bad hit yesterday. While he'd been at the cinema with Dan. The thought made him physically ill.

It was a hard thought to push aside, now that he had Kyle's jobs to do on top of his jobs on top of his coursework, and his lectures, and his revisions. And Kyle did the rough, the rowdy work. He enjoyed it. Phil couldn't say that he didn't welcome the distraction, although his conscience cowered somewhere in him like three men already had in front of him today. It didn't help that they were pigs. It was no justification for a useless, a reckless amount of violence.

Phil had hated fights all throughout school.

Berk accepted the parcel with a single nod and a swift glance at Phil's bloody, bruised knuckles.

For now, Phil enjoyed the distance he felt from his own self, and instead of watching his actions, of reflecting on them, on his life, on all the bad and worse choices he'd made, he turned his back to that miserable, weak creature and went on with his day. Two more jobs to complete. A short assignment to do. A lecture to attend.

Routine. It didn't require consciousness.

 

**# fifteenth of december**

 

Phil was tired. When he was tired, he became sloppy. Sloppiness was punished in his line of work. He'd learnt the lesson at least seventeen times over the span of the past few years, but he kept coming back to it like to a favourite poem, or novel. Just a favourite line, maybe.

If he couldn't remember to keep his guard up, injury was inevitable.

Although the area around his left eye was swollen and his vision, notably his depth perception, suffered from it, Phil pressed on. He had the key pocketed that he'd been sent for, but the other guy had insulted him, and Phil couldn't let bigots slide. At least that's what he told himself. At least that's what his thoughts clung to instead of Dan. Some random asshole couldn't call Phil a faggot and get away with it.

Phil threw a right hook, then followed it up with a side kick. The technique had never worked as well in training as it worked now.

Where had the times gone when Phil had been afraid of hurting people still? Unwilling to? When he'd been the one to cower, to run, to shield his head, his guard better back then than it was now, and wait it all out?

The guy faltered, and Phil, wordlessly, turned around.

He had to hurry for his next lecture. It was given by Falken. Tardy was lethal. He already had a rapidly forming black eye, impossible to cover up. The finished assignment in his backpack likely wasn't as pristine anymore as it had been when Phil had stuffed it in there, fresh from the printer, as his shift was about to start and Berk cleared his throat from the officer chair. Phil had hurried to get away from the hijacked printer, but what hadn't Phil hurried to do for the past hours, days, and to a slightly lesser extent, weeks, months, years? His entire existence was a hurry.

He hadn't slept in two days.

The caffeine had him energetic, but beside himself, like the world had been shifted by a millimetre or two, and although his body didn't bump into more things than Phil made a habit of, it was something else that seemed to bruise, not with every step he took, but with every time he opened his eyes after the split-second of bliss when he blinked, and with every thought that surfaced from the grey mush that was his brain.

High-strung, he barely registered when his bike's wheels slipped on pavement coated in a thin layer of ice, or on wet cobblestones, and by the time it got through to him, he'd righted himself and pressed on.

He made it to the lecture on time. He turned his slightly crumpled, but otherwise unharmed assignment in. Falken was unreasonable anyways, expecting paper. There were things such as e-mail or Google docs. He didn't look his professor, his boss, in the eye. He knew Falken would watch him like a hawk; but that didn't mean he had to confirm this knowledge. He could treat it as an educated assumption for as long as he wanted to. Or until Falken would inevitably hold him back after the lecture.

He sat completely still. But his heart still raced. His muscles still ached, his vision was blurry. There was not enough time. Not enough sleep.

Phil wasn't efficient enough. Not smart enough. Not fit enough, not resilient enough, not ruthless enough, not kind enough, not enough, not enough, not enough. The word repeated in his head until it had lost all meaning, until there was only a combination of letters Phil couldn't make sense of anymore that stabbed at him, six tiny blades, over and over and over and over again.

Phil was trapped.

Not in a 'if you chicken out you'll die' - kind of way, although he wasn't a hundred percent positive about that, but in a 'you need to finish this level before logging out, otherwise everything you've achieved so far was in vain' - kind of way. And the pause button on the controller was broken.

He was trapped in a cage he'd stumbled into, attracted by the light, and now he was too blinded to find the exit although he knew it to be so close that hope had never lost its power to hurt him.

He trudged on, or rather, he blinked and blinked although it hurt, and kept his eyes open, and listened, and took notes, and promised his body another unhealthy dose of caffeine where it begged for rest. Perhaps he could take a nap in the library later, or two.

He didn't feel much like a soldier, not literally, not even in the most metaphorical sense of the word. He felt like a puppet on a string. Hadn’t he already had this breaking point? Hadn’t he already suffered from it? Hadn’t he already suppressed it, and handed his life over to The Insomniac?

He took more notes.

 

**# sixteenth of december**

 

When Dan called at two am, Phil was on a job. He hadn't quite stopped being on jobs for a while; they had begun to blur into each other so much so that he would have to remind himself of a client's name, or a criminal's name, though those two titles often went hand in hand, before he faced them; so much so that for the first time in years, he needed to double-check addresses, and things that were wanted from him, and whether or not he had packed his spyglass. He needed to second-guess himself with every step, and it made him slow.

He was fast to pick up Dan's call, though.

He blamed it on the noise. It rang loudly, and he'd been holding it, with his spyglass clutched in the other hand. He was on stake-out. He couldn't risk being caught, injured as he already was, and worn out. There was no need for external enemies when every waking second meant a fight against the force of sleep, against his head that throbbed and his eyes that burned with heat while he shivered in the winter cold.

He shouldn't technically be on the phone. He should have declined the call, and put his phone in silent mode, and kept watching the stupid mansion on the other side of the street. The treehouse he was crouched in was uncomfortably small, and eerie, the shadow of a childhood lost, abandoned to now lie covered in mould. He should have, he should have, he should have.

Every part of his body ached, but something in him eased as soon as he heard the familiar low noise of Dan's breathing. Even as he stayed unsure, even as his mind replayed over and over again the memory of chapped lips on his, the memory of tears that stained his icy fingers, the guilt, the shame, even as his heart twisted and turned in his chest, Phil breathed easier.

He knew he was fucked. Oxygen had become a luxury.

And most people were fucked as soon as necessities became luxuries, too. Phil wasn't one of the lucky bastards who could afford luxuries.

"Hey," Dan whispered.

Phil released a slow breath.

"Lester?"

Phil sucked in a slower breath. And released it. And repeated both steps. He needed to cherish this moment; the weight had finally dropped from his lungs and he could breathe, breathe, breathe.

A car drove past in the street.

"Hey," Phil replied with his voice dropped so low that he himself barely heard his own words. Dan caught them nevertheless. "Can't sleep?"

"Working," Dan murmured. "On this assignment that I was supposed to finish last week. You?"

"Working. On this job that wasn't supposed to be mine, but then you got half our team injured."

Dan was silent. Too silent. He didn't speak; it was as if he had ceased to breathe, too.

Phil regretted his words immediately, although he shouldn't have; they were true. And Phil worried immediately, although he shouldn't have. Dan had tricked him. And yet. How much of it had been Dan's fault? And hadn't he been honest?

"Dan?" Phil asked. He forgot to whisper. His voice rang through the treehouse with too much fervour, too much hidden behind it. Too loud. Phil bit his lip.

Something rustled in the background of the call.

Dan's breathing started again. He had to have put the phone down; his breaths now were strangled, irregular and ragged, but not as if he had been holding them, but rather - he was crying again, and this time Phil noticed the strangled sobs, noticed Dan's attempt and his failing to be quiet.

"Listen," Phil whispered. He righted the spyglass again. He needed to pay attention, even though his mind screamed for rest.

"No," Dan interrupted. "No, you're right. I did. I knew you could have helped, and I went along gladly when they asked me to distract you. I just - I did - I - forget about it. It doesn't matter. You haven't slept in what, two days? Three? And it's my fault, so. What do you care for explanations."

He'd started in a whisper, but his voice grew continuously louder while he spoke. Phil wondered if it pained him to speak the words, or if it pained him not to speak others; in any case, the fact that he was in pain was obvious.

"That's not technically true, I took a nap at the library. And you know it was my fault for staying, too," Phil murmured.

"Did you want to? Stay?"

"I did."

"And I did want to see a movie with you." Dan yawned.

Phil couldn't feel his right leg, or his left foot. His entire body was numb, but electricity flitted through it, now, burning away at emptiness, kindling with wood that was too damp to burn. He pictured the boy on his bed in his dorm, a heavy book open in his lap, not one with a story, or an entire world hidden between its pages, but one with the grey plague of bureaucracy stashed where villains and heroes alike could have been, pictured the deep shadows under his eyes and his frail form, pictured how he would disappear into the darkness, clad in black as he usually was. He pictured the loudness of the boy's despair, too. The scream that always seemed to ooze from him, even when he sat silently with his head down.

"I do want to see a movie with you," Dan added. "And other things."

In this moment, Phil spotted someone move on the property that he was watching.

He cursed, a string of words so utterly uneloquent that they were almost a sacrilege to this children's spot he'd used as a hide-out for the past hour, and dropped the call.

He would finish this job. And another one. And another one. And then, maybe, he'd get in a nap at the quiet room at uni that was supposed to be for prayer and used more often than not for illegal activities. Nap-taking was one of the minor offences that occurred there. Like this, he almost managed to shift his focus as he climbed down the tree, shift it from the promise of Dan's soothing presence to the promise of a nap in an amount of hours that he could count with his hands, perhaps even on one hand only. He almost managed.

But to lose focus during a job was dangerous. It could be lethal. And Phil, no matter how low he had sunken, no matter how much he wished his life to be different, and how much he sometimes hated himself for the decision's he'd made and kept making, didn't want to die.

He needed to remind himself of his priorities.

Dan couldn't deter him any further.

(But, a small voice in his head whispered in a voice that sounded so painfully young, and scared, an innocent, and all those things that Phil had been when he'd first come to London; if you've already lost your path, what is there to get deterred from? Where can a deceiving light lead you if you're already lost?)

 

**# seventeenth of december**

 

Phil's nose was probably not broken. It didn't feel broken; but he didn't feel the pain in his knuckles, either, and he could see that they were bleeding quite heavily. Then again, those had better not be broken. And his nose was bleeding, too.

At least his opponent looked even worse for wear. The man's nose was definitely broken. Phil had felt it crack under his fist, had seen the pain well up in the man's eyes.

Another punch, another front kick right to his stomach, and the man faltered.

Phil snatched the little parcel from his outstretched hand just before he crumpled to the dirty, wet ground, and dispatched a call for an ambulance from the man's phone before he bolted, or rather, limped away.

Five hours until his next job. He needed a shower and a first-aid-kit. His clothes were covered in dirt, his skin itched, and dried blood covered his hands and face. He tasted fresh blood on his lips, too. Berk could wait for whatever treasure Phil had acquired for him until morning. He wasn't sure he could bike in his condition, and his flat wasn't far, so he pushed the bike along the deserted streets for twenty minutes until he reached the wretched place he reluctantly called home. Few people passed him. They didn't spare the lanky boy with his hood up a second glance. Some didn't spare him a first glance, only hurried to wherever they were expected with eyes trained on the slippery ground.

Phil was cold when he reached his flat. Cold to the core, or cold from within, it made no difference. He showered, although the water burned where his skin was cracked, and watched the water go down the drain, stained red. It didn't provide him with satisfaction, only with a grimness that kept him upright until he'd put sloppy bandages on his wounds, until he'd made sure that in fact, his nose wasn't broken, and that yes, the fading black eye had been renewed.

In less than a week, he'd be home for Christmas. What lie could he make up for his family this time? He’d joined a fight club? He’d broken up at brawl between to other students? He’d been beaten up by police officers in a protest? No, he was too British and too white for that to be believable.

He dragged himself to his bedroom still naked, across the tiny, cold hallway. His injuries were minor; nothing he couldn't recover from, nothing he couldn't have easily dealt with and looked past if he weren't so terribly tired that with every step, he seemed to drag all those waking hours with him on a chain that weighed him down.

He didn't bother to get dressed in more than some loose pyjama pants, although a part of him shivered in the cold, and wrapped himself in the coarse blanket instead.

He reached for his advent calendar. It had been days again since he'd last opened it; days since he'd been in his flat. His heart was tired, and to see the advent calendar again tore at it with newfound vigour and intensity. He thought of his family. He was estranged to them; already now a part of him was frantic to make up lies, to make up stories and keep them in a fake light where mainly darkness was to be found, or a light they wouldn't ever be able to comprehend. The familiar-foreign feeling at the thought of his childhood home weighed his body down as if he were buried under the Himalaya mountains with all their weight on him, waiting to crush every single particle in his body to bits. The familiar-foreign sensation of the part of his heart that Dan had captured with a deadly sling and wouldn't let go was dangerous, but it was the danger of a rollercoaster, a thrill that might kill, but that Phil still felt he was willing to accept, that Phil still feared he might run towards.

He hadn't spoken to Dan since the abrupt end of their call. He hadn't seen the boy, hadn't had the time to check on him, hadn't found a justification for his irrational wish.

Phil wasn't keen on letting his thoughts linger on the curve of Dan's hunched over back, or the slender hands that had wrapped all these presents and scrawled all these numbers on them. From parcel numbered thirteen spilled four little chocolates.

Phil ate one, then reached for the little, flat present with a fourteen on it in Dan's sloppy handwriting, and unwrapped it without ceremony.

The photo inside was so ridiculous, and so evidently photoshopped that Phil snorted into the silence. They could take at a photo like that. Close together; perhaps not with Phil having three arms, and different lighting entirely on their faces, but close to each other on some grassy patch. In the picture, it was spring. They were surrounded by green grass, and by daisies. Phil briefly closed his eyes.

He put the photograph away before his tiny, amused smile could turn to tears. He grabbed the next present to distract himself. It seemed that was all he was capable of nowadays. Distracting himself. On and on and on and on. What happened when you could neither stop nor go on?

The fifteenth present was soft and squishy, and when he tore the wrapping paper from it, he found a cheap little stuffed snowman. One of the buttons that made up his eyes had come loose. Phil managed half a grin, and sat it on his bedside table next to the torn teddy bear. They made an odd couple. Both worn and frankly not worth a lot; broken, ugly, mismatched. Just like Dan and himself. Which was not a thought that should be ever uttered even silently.

Phil unwrapped the next present. He found a tiny bauble. It was a miracle the thing wasn't broken; it might have been less ugly if it were. A small smile formed again on Phil's split lips. It hurt, but he kept it there as he imagined the bauble on his family's Christmas tree. It would fit. In all its ugliness, it would fit on the tree and Phil might have gotten angry about that two weeks ago, but he didn't have it in him, not anymore.

He opened number seventeen, a bigger present, pliant under his fingers and wrapped with more care than any of the previous ones. He'd yawned twice by the time his fidgeting fingers managed to break through the wrapping.

There was a tshirt inside, crumpled up and stuffed into a ball. The material was soft and worn.

It smelled overwhelmingly of Dan.

Phil was tired. So tired. He was too tired to think rationally, too tired to care about his pride or his dignity, too tired even to care about his future, and how it all stood on a shaky ledge, how it could all fall and smash on a faraway ground within a millisecond, within just one more bad decision. No matter how far the ground was, only one fall separated the top of the mountain from it.

Phil turned off the light. Darkness was never quite complete in London, but it was complete enough so that when he closed his eyes, he could pretend not that the world didn't exist, but that he himself wasn't part of it. He could pretend that his bed was a solitary island, and he could pretend he'd never have to get up again, he'd never hurt anyone again, he'd never lie again, he'd never do all those things that his five-year-old self would have frowned at again.

He pressed the tshirt to his chest. The scent of it, the scent of Dan, enveloped him as a soft blanket. Sleep came upon him easily.

 

**# eighteenth of december**

 

Phil coughed.

People turned to glare at him, their annoyance visible, and Phil couldn't blame them. It had been the fifteenth time in the span of the past twenty minutes. His throat burned, but his bottle of water was long emptied, and he'd downed his morning coffee before Falken had entered the lecture hall. In the front of the room, the professor didn't pause for a millisecond when the noise of Phil's lungs' rebellion against some kind of virus or another echoed through the quiet. It was as if he had perfected the art of ignoring Phil. His fellow students hadn't, and he wasn't in their good graces most of the time. He'd been, for a while.

During the first few weeks, or months even, of his studies at King's College, all had been normal. He'd struggled to make friends, and then made some. He'd gotten a good amount of drunk a good amount of times. He'd ignored the debt he was in, and the fact that he was crashing in his mother's midwife's old friend's basement, which was not a durable arrangement.

He'd found a boyfriend, even.

It would have been harsh to say it had all gone to hell, then. And if it had, then he'd liked hell, in the beginning.

The Insomniac had, first of all, granted him a space to study with actual real natural light that poured onto his table through the windows, and then a job that, although he'd been terribly suited for it, had paid some bills. It paid all of the bills now, and granted him more, but as the opportunities rose, so did the prices he had to pay. It was a little like growing up.

Perhaps it was a lot like growing up. Or perhaps it was just simply that; growing up. He'd lost his friends, eventually. They were strangers to him now, people he met in lectures now and again, people he stumbled across in the library. People that he avoided, and that avoided him, although he couldn't tell anymore which had come first.

He hacked his lungs up again, gasping for air. The pressure on his head had tears stream to his eyes. The students' faces, turned towards him, grew blurry, as though he wasn't wearing his glasses. He wondered, sometimes, what they might think of him after these years that had changed him so much, and yet hadn't permitted him to change at all. He couldn't allow this change, or else he'd have lost his escape route back to sanity. And for now, he couldn't seem sane to anyone; his course work was impeccable, at times remarkable enough that Falken pulled strings to get it published in some academic magazine or another; but this had to hardly matter in the eyes of his fellow students. They would notice how he didn’t talk to them, how the only people he spoke to were professors.They would see his appearance, oftentimes torn, would have seen him deteriorate into this shell of a person that he was now, and could now watch him demolish this last wall he'd feebly constructed, too. His injuries were too visible to conceal, and too many, and too unimportant in the grand scheme of things. There was a high likelihood no-one was watching, too.

Except for Dan.

And for Falken, who hadn't spared Phil a single glance and yet had watched him like a hawk.

The bell rang. Phil rushed to gather his things, partly to get to his next lecture, partly to escape Falken's more obvious scrutiny. He always felt that given enough time, Falken might have taken his brain apart and searched it, searched its hidden vaults and dark corners.

Falken, obviously, must have observed his hurry, and the expression on his face that Phil wasn't able to school into something less exhausted, less murderous, less desperate. The professor threw a bag of cough drops at him, and let him go without further words.

Phil caught the bag. He didn't hang around to give his thanks. He hurried on.

There was a leak somewhere inside of him; a leak that kept getting worse. He'd lost most of his motivation, and during past few months, most of his will to live, too, however resilient it had been before; he had lost parts of himself. He knew the feeling of an empty space aching to be filled. He knew it better than the sensation of being whole. Something else leaked from him now, something that had set out to create the largest gap of all. That was his last semblance of humanity.

It was a well-known secrets that amongst all things alive and dead in the universe, illusions were the hardest to kill. Phil felt he might have reached that point in his downward spiral where the illusions themselves were untangled and left to die.

 

**# nineteenth of december**

 

Phil couldn't sleep. It was ironic. It was beyond ironic. Any and all reason would have suggested that even insomnia had to eventually succumb if its bearer was tired to the point of delirium. But what reason had Phil left? And what reason would his body obey to, when his mind and body suggested such different things? It was a collaboration gone haywire. His confused heart didn't help.

So Phil gave up, at four am, after two hours of tossing and turning in his sheets, of coughing, of shivering and sweating in turns. Dan's shirt didn't smell like Dan anymore, and the presence of it had lost its comfort, as wrong and deceiving as that comfort had been. He got dressed again and brushed his teeth. The toothbrush scraped against his sore gums. Even the toothpaste had a sour taste to it, just like the tap water Phil forced himself to gulp down, just like the orange juice he'd bought in an attempt to be healthy and grant his body some quick vitamins. Mindlessly, Phil popped another cough drop into his mouth, grabbed his backpack and left his flat.

He headed towards campus, then towards the dorms. He knew them. He'd spied on a number of people here. Most importantly, he'd spied on Dan.

He parked his bike, fastened it to a lamppost with its chain, suppressed a cough and scaled the fire escape. It wasn't hard to do, but still hardly done since no-one had anything to hide here, whether it be companions late at night or getting home at dawn. People would march in through the front door, or stumble in at times. Elevators, and even stairs, were decidedly more comfortable than the metal ladders out here. The steps were slick with rain. Phil forced himself to be glad that they weren't covered in a layer of ice, and pressed on past countless windows.

His lungs' protests were faint. Dan's room was at the top of the building.

He forcibly had privileges; The Insomniac and Coffairee were enemies for a reason. There were more gangs in the city, if they could be called that, but The Insomniac and Coffairee had history. His dorm room was a single, and fairly large. He only had to share his bathroom with three or four more students. It was a luxury, and one Dan paid for more dearly than the boy would be aware of just now. He was still at the top of the well where Phil was slowly, but certainly nearing the bottom. Only this close to the impact, the end of his fall that had such high chances of being lethal, had he realized he'd been falling at all. He wondered if Dan knew. If Dan was smarter than him.

Soft blue light streamed from Dan's window. Phil released a slow breath.

Dan sat on his bed, hunched over his laptop. He wore a black t-shirt that was far too big on him. It slid off his shoulder precariously. Phil made about half a point not to stare at his collarbone. He'd known how skinny, how lanky Dan still was, how little he'd grown into himself, but seeing him like this was worse than simple knowledge. It was like he held the boy’s fragile heart in his hand. Not his heart as in his love. His heart as in the muscle that pumped his blood through his veins, and kept him alive.

Dan hacked away at his keyboard. Phil watched the slender fingers move in a frenzy. For all he knew, Dan might be playing an online game, or he might be finishing an assignment at the very last minute. His face was obscured behind a softly curled fringe, but Phil could imagine the gleam in his eyes, and the way he bit his chapped lips.

He made himself comfortable on the roof, as far as comfortable went on a roof in the cold bite of December air; just so that he might still see Dan if he leaned an inch to the left, but stayed hidden from view otherwise.

With slow, freezing fingers he pulled out his phone, and called Dan.

He couldn't help it. He leaned over to watch, although his face was too close to the window, could too easily be spotted by someone remotely observant.

Dan ditched whatever he'd been doing on his laptop in less than a heartbeat, and picked up the call before Phil got to the point where he'd planned to decide what he was going to say. Somehow, he managed to startle at the sound of Dan's voice.

"Hey," the boy said.

"Hey," Phil replied.

They were silent.

Phil moved away from the window, just a little, just so that he was out of Dan's direct view. He breathed as deeply as his poor lungs would allow him.

"You should be asleep," Dan said. "You looked awful today. And that's coming from a certified human potato with eye shadows darker than the dark side of the moon."

Phil had been meaning to play it down, but his lungs decided not to work in his favour, and to throw another fit. He wheezed.

"Shit, Phi- Lester. Shit, Lester."

Phil attempted to regain his breath. Dan almost calling him Phil didn't help with the issue. Or maybe it did.

"I'd like to be asleep," Phil rasped. It wasn't a lie. It was a mere half-truth. What he'd like most was to knock on that window like it wasn't a big deal, and for Dan to let him climb in as if they did this every night. What he wanted was to be close to Dan again, were it to hold his hand, to hug him, or to kiss him. It was quite useless to wish in every case; wishes didn't come true just so. But if one had make wishes, it was preferable to wish for something unattainable, something as far out of reach as a star only visible in the southern hemisphere, or a star not visible to the human eye at all. It was a whole other branch of naive, of stupid, to wish for something so close and yet so impossible as it was for Phil to right now be close to Dan. He relished the ache in his heart. It completed his assortment of chest pains. He liked when things were complete. He liked when he could focus on physical pain, although sometimes, admittedly, that worsened the pain itself.

Dan breathed a laugh.

"So go to sleep," he murmured. "Want me to sing a lullaby?"

"I want to talk to you," Phil blurted.

Despite himself, he watched for Dan's reaction. He watched as the boy fixed his fringe in a quick gesture, as his eyes, now visible, widened slightly. As a tiny smile spread on his face. In the blue light, Phil watched something shift in the boy's expression, something that almost weakened him enough to knock on the window right then and there, to beg to be let in, beg to be held. But he couldn't. He'd dug his own grave deep enough for two people. He didn’t need Dan falling in there.

"Okay," Dan said, finally. He pushed the laptop of his lap and carefully shut it, plunging the room into darkness. Phil hurriedly pulled away. "Talk to me."

Phil watched the sleeping city from one of its roofs, the lit Christmas decorations in windows everywhere, the streetlights, the big screens advertising this or that, nothing but luminous spots from afar; he watched London, more specifically, illuminated sights he'd gaped at when he'd first come here that were now but more lights to blur in front of his eyes. Lights, lights, so many lights, and yet, when he looked up, all was dark. There were no stars in the clouded sky. It had a chemical, purple hue to it. Phil closed his eyes, and thought back to easier times. When he would have been on his back in his backyard, the air a soft summer breeze, and Dan would have been next to him.

"What is your favourite animal?" he asked.

Dan released a surprised little laugh.

"Uh, I like dogs, I guess? Llamas are cool. How about you?"

"Dogs are definitely up there," Phil said. "I've always thought red pandas were great."

"Mmmh."

"Do you want to sleep?"

"I don't sleep."

"Dan-" Phil attempted. For a moment, the boy had sounded vulnerable, but then it was as if he had caught himself. The harshness of his tone didn't fit the image Phil saw when he leaned to the left. Dan's face was pained. He had his eyes half-shut, his lips twisted into a grimace. Phil was too far away, too far separated from Dan, but he thought he could see tears in the boy's eyes.

"Shut it, Phil."

"I'm sorry," he whispered, and watched Dan shake his head, watched him shake something away. Phil pulled away from the window.

"No, it's okay," Dan murmured. "I shouldn't have snapped at you. Let's not talk about sleep anymore if we can't do it, anyways. Do you want to talk about video games?"

Phil did want to talk about video games, although the nostalgia sat heavy in his stomach, like too much of a favourite food. Dan was staining all his childhood memories, all those he'd treasured deep in his heart, all those he'd promised to come back to with a degree in hand, to forget about his horrible deeds. He wanted to talk about anything with Dan that would let them communicate, that would fix this tension between them. He didn't want to be like fucking Romeo and Juliet. He knew all about Romeo and Juliet, and yet, he hadn’t seen the signs. He hated the trope, hated his own incapability of changing things, hated his own cowardice.He'd never realized how much his job meant life or death until he'd toppled over to the death part of the equation.

The wind picked up. Phil coughed just as he wanted to reply. The harsh, metallic sound bounced off the roof's tiles. Shit. Phil held his breath. He shivered.

"Phil," Dan said, slowly. "Where are you?"

"I-" Phil began.

Then, Dan stuck his head out of his window, wide-eyed, wind-swept and beautiful. He held his phone pressed to his ear, frozen. Phil slowly dropped his own.

"Hey," he said.

Dan blinked. A slow smile crept on his face, then a smirk.

"Would you believe," he said. "A rare Phil Lester, and on my roof."

"That could be a rare Phil Lester in your room, if you want it to be." Phil smirked. For a brief second, he managed to forget about the pounding behind his temples, the way his entire body ached with fatigue and suppressed illness.

"I'd go for one of those in my bed," Dan said. "Come in. Aren't you already sick? Aren't you supposed to be old and responsible?"

"I will have you know I'm neither of those things," Phil said. He coughed again. His mind had trouble comprehending all the things Dan had just said, and successfully maneuvering him towards the open window.

Dan snorted, but shook his head and let him in.

Phil had been in his room before. Just not in the presence of Dan. He made sure to end the call before he stuffed his phone into his backpack. Dan, behind him, shut the window.

They stood in the middle of the room. The silence was heavy around them. Phil couldn't breathe. That might not have been the silence though, that might just have been the fact that his lungs were still rallying.

How could he ask for what he wanted? For affection? For Dan to hold him? Was this a thing that people asked for, or was it something only given to the worthy ones?

"Welcome to my room," Dan said. His voice sounded softer than before. "I assume you've been here before."

"I'm not here to kill you or anything," Phil blurted. It hadn't been the smartest move, admittedly, but at least he hadn't said that he was here to kill Dan. Which he wasn't. He needed to go on before he could confuse himself. "I mean, I have no Insomniac agenda - shit, I do have an insomniac agenda. What I mean to say is that I'm not here for a job, or to keep you from doing one, or anything that has to do with the coffeeshop The Insomniac, I just couldn't sleep and wanted to be here."

Dan lunged forward and slung his arms around Phil.

His immediate reaction was to fight. All his instincts screamed at him to bring his knee to Dan's groin, and to match the arms that were around him, to choke Dan until he would have to let go. What had these past years done to him? What had these past few days done to him?

"Shit," Phil breathed. He hugged Dan back, and buried his face in the boy's neck. He could feel those collarbones pressed against him now. This was Dan in his arms. He hugged him tighter.

They stood, for long, agonized moments they stood, until agony grew sweeter and sweeter, until they did not cling to each other for dear life anymore, but hugged, almost as if they weren't torn and broken creatures anymore, but people again. Two people in a hug.

"We are a mess," Phil murmured into Dan's neck. The boy shivered in his arms.

"Yeah," he said, his voice rough.

Phil grinned.

"Sensitive neck?"

"Fuck off," Dan breathed. Definitely a sensitive neck.

Phil loosened his grasp to look at Dan. His cheeks were tinted bright red,his eyes shone glassy. Phil revelled in the boy's soft smile. His entire face was a painting in the dim light. Phil could finally breathe. Well, partly. His lungs rallied, still, but that was minor, that was unimportant next to the beautiful boy that stood right in front of him.

"I would kiss you," Dan said. His stance was defiant now. He had tilted his chin upwards slightly, and his voice was louder than Phil had ever heard it in a non-fighting situation. Was this a fight to Dan? Was he afraid?

Phil hesitated.

Dan drew a shaky breath. "But you're really terribly sick right now."

He grinned. Phil groaned.

"As long as we aren't fighting," he murmured, and hugged Dan again. "As long as you don't feel like you have to fight me."

"I do, technically," Dan objected. His voice was back to quiet now. Back to insecure.

He was right again. He did, technically. He was contractually obliged, technically. There was something in there, in the parts that no-one read, about fraternization with the enemy, about a loyalty that went way beyond normal corporate strategy.

Phil stayed silent.

"You know what's funny?" Dan said over his shoulders. His voice was thick with something heavy, as far from mirth as humanly possible. Phil swallowed hard.

"What?" he asked.

"I hate law," Dan said. "I really fucking hate law."

Why, Phil wanted to ask. Why are you doing this to yourself? Why, if this isn't what you want at all? He stayed silent. He tightened his arms around the boy instead, and let their hearts beat closer to each other. As cheesy as it sounded, the rhythm of a heartbeat that wasn't his own had always calmed him, had given him a rhythm to breathe to, to think to, that couldn't be flawed as his own so often was.

"I want to drop out," Dan whispered. He sounded strangled. There was a whole world of him that he was holding back. A whole universe of Dan that Phil had had no idea about. A whole universe that wanted to get out, that spilled over the edges its prison, all these secrets, all these words that burst from Dan now. "I want to drop out, but I don't want to move back home, I don't-"

"Shh," he whispered. "It'll be okay. Some day, it'll be okay. You can drop out. You can move away. They'll make sure you can't ever get into a prestigious university again, but they'll let you live, and you'll be fine."

Dan sobbed into his shoulder. Phil coaxed him towards his bed, softly. Dan was pliant in his arms. Pliant and breakable.

Everything was silent around them. Even London seemed to hold its breath. No cars drove by, nothing creaked, or whispered, or rustled around them. This was finally the island Phil had longed for all this time, the island he'd never quite managed to created for himself. Dan's breathing finally softened again.

"It'll be okay," Phil repeated. "It'll be okay."

The uncomfortable sensation that it wasn't Dan he was trying to reassure anymore fogged up his lungs. He breathed through it, and clung to Dan.

They made pathetic life vests to each other, and their tiny bubble of safety was confined to the dark, to the liminal London of early morning hours. Fragile as it was, and fragile as they were, Phil feared it would burst if ever they attempted to take it with them into the day. Phil feared he would burst, too.

"Thanks," Dan mumbled.

For what, Phil wanted to say. Creeping on you? Basic human decency? The fact that I hate what I've gotten myself into, too? Again, he preferred to stay silent rather than to utter the words that pushed to the front of his mind.

His head ached. In just a few short hours, he'd have to be at The Insomniac. He wished for his illusion of normality. He wanted to feel like a person again. He wanted to have a shift with Luca, even if it was the dreaded, stressful morning rush, and he wanted to share notes with Carmen, and pretend he was a normal amount of stressed out and sleep deprived, that normal amount that was listed somewhere in the book of unwritten requirements for a university student.

He wanted to sleep. With Dan so close to him, with Dan taking up every single one of his senses, and all his conscious thought, his eyelids drooped, and his heartbeat slowed. Sleep finally came to him.

"Sleep," he heard Dan whisper, voice far off and yet everywhere. As if he were swimming in it. "You'll be fine, too."

 

**# twentieth of december**

 

"-expected. I will see you all in the new year," Falken said over the bell.

Phil wanted to be ecstatic. It was six pm. This had been his last lecture of the year; his last lecture before winter break. Study break. Revision break. Whatever, a break, that was what mattered. Most of his fellow students were already beyond tipsy, and ecstatic. Phil just felt empty, and too guilty to look his professor in the eye. He'd spent two nights at Dan's, in the boy's bed, sleeping, sleeping for some of those stolen hours. He’d never get all of them back. It was hard to tear things from the pockets of hatred, and fear. He wondered for how many weeks he would need to sleep for all traces of his sleeplessness to be abolished. It was an unnecessary question. He never would sleep for weeks, never would even get more than two, or perhaps three full nights of sleep in a row. His medication made him drowsier than the lack of sleep. He didn't care to take it. And he didn't have time to properly care for himself.

Besides, he had a library session scheduled in a little over an hour from now, and an errand to run prior to that. And perhaps a sandwich to snatch, or at least a coffee.

There wasn't ever such a thing as a break.

Two more days, two more nights crammed with shifts and jobs, and then he'd be home. He'd eat, he'd act, he'd try to sleep with folded limbs in his childhood bed, and he'd eat some more until his mother ceased to worry and his brother started teasing.

Two more days, two more nights. And then? It had to go on. It all had to always go on.

After all, he couldn't stop pedalling if he wanted to stay upright on his bike.

 

**# twenty-first of december**

 

Dan called late at night, when Phil had just gotten home to shower before another job, one that involved a clean suit, hair combed back and guns carefully hidden. One that involved lit venues, fancy dress, champagne and academic conversation.

These were the jobs Phil had been eager for, once. These parties of London's hidden high society, that still wanted the thrill and the secrecy that modern media coverage just wouldn't allow them. Novelists and poets came together here, and Phil had been charmed, the first time Falken and taken him along, just him, not Kyle. It was what had lured him in, finally. The desire to always be part of this charmed atmosphere, this charmed community of people.

They made him sick to the stomach now. He had to force the champagne down his throat, and the smile on his face. Where in the beginning, he'd stumbled over his words, eager to please, he now listened, and from time to time managed to say something witty, himself.

He'd learned, so much was true. He'd gotten what he'd been promised. He had his own invitation, was more than a tag-a-long, nowadays, but of course, it was still a job, still always dangerous. The more he listened, the less charmed he was by drunken men and elated women, by the London high society of nameless people and people that didn't care to be named. Masks were masks, it turned out, and although artfully constructed, no true art.

Phil loosened the knot of his tie, and accepted the call.

"Hey," he said.

"On your way into high society?" Dan said.

Phil groaned.

"How do you always know everything?"

"I'm very good at being creepy," Dan said. Phil could hear his shrug. "I also happen to like my target quite a bit. It's easy to keep a watch out for someone I can't stop staring at, anyways."

"Shut up," Phil said.

He heard Dan laugh breathily at the other end of the line.

"Before you go, open your advent calendar?"

"Oh," Phil said. "Yes."

"Where did you leave off?"

"Your shirt," Phil mumbled, and cleared his throat. "Think about washing it?"

"Thought you might appreciate it that way."

“You made a lot of presumptions before you gave that to me.”

“Well, I turned out to be quite right about most of them, didn’t I?” Dan said.

And he was right. Dan was smarter than him. Cunning. Daring. Phil shook the thoughts off and reached for the advent calendar.

Present number eighteen was small, and paper-thin.

"I swear," Phil said. "If this is another dick pic."

"I gambled," Dan said. "I couldn't be too generous in the beginning. You would have killed me in my sleep or something, because you would have thought this was an elaborate trick."

"I did think this was an elaborate trick," Phil admitted. Unwrapping a present with only one hand was a challenge, but he wore a suit already, and he was above such mundanities. The sticky tape came off quickly.

Regular white paper fell from the package, probably snatched from a printer at uni or at Coffairee. It was all folded, and holes were cut into it. Phil stared at it, confused.

"What the-"

"Unfold it," Dan interrupted.

Phil did as he'd been told. Ten minutes until a car would pick him up. No wonder poor little Phil had fallen for the trap. They'd promised him all he'd wanted; intelligent conversation, wealth, a place where he could belong with his weird ideas and big words and big dreams.

The paper was a snowflake. Easy to crush. Just like Phil’s big dreams.

"Did you make that?"

"Yeah," Dan said. "I might have run out of good ideas. Took me ten minutes to get it right, too."

"Adorable," Phil said. "You're such a Freshman."

Dan's pout was almost audible. Phil reached for the next present. It was larger, and round, and the wrapping on it fell apart as soon as Phil touched it. A tiny snow globe fell onto his blanket.

The snow inside was orange, with some blue-ish bits in between. The Santa's face was on the wrong side of the roughly sculpted figure.

"This is the ugliest snowglobe I've ever seen," Phil said.

"Exactly what I was aiming for. Superlatives are memorable. Isn’t that the kind of shit you learn about when you do fucking language and linguistics, of all things?"

Phil couldn't help but laugh. "You're an idiot."

"Most definitely," Dan agreed.

"You're not actually, you know?"

Dan said nothing.

Phil bit his lip and unwrapped the next present. It was beanie.

"You got that wrong," Phil said.

"Huh?"

"This is a nice beanie," he explained. "I like it."

"Oh," Dan said. His voice was small. "I might have wanted that, too. Come on, today's, too."

Phil had already torn the wrapping off the present with the number twenty-one scrawled on it. It was barely legible; but then, there were only four presents left.

A single glove, red and soft. The other glove.

"You know," Phil said, but then he cut himself off. He'd wanted to say that Dan could have spared himself a whole lot of trouble, and just been nice from the beginning, but that wasn't true. Dan couldn't have made himself more vulnerable to Phil earlier on; he couldn't have been nicer. It was Phil's fault, and it wasn't - he wanted to turn back time on the past three and a half years of his life, but he couldn't, and he knew he wouldn't do it differently. He'd been young, naive, and he wouldn't know better however much he wished he could have. The past was the past, and reality was reality, no matter how much he wished it weren't. Dan couldn’t have been nicer. Phil remember itching to kill the boy vividly, so vividly that sometimes he feared the urge was still there, hidden somewhere. Sometimes all he wanted was to stay away from Dan. To keep him safe. But that was the single worst decision any character in any story had ever made. And, even if they were in a situation that smelled dangerously of two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, he at least wouldn’t be that character. His studies had to be good for something.

"What do I know?" Dan asked.

"Nevermind," Phil said. "Thank you."

"Don't you have to go?"

Phil did, indeed, have to go. This might turn out to be the worst gathering of society he'd been to yet, although his suit finally properly fit, although he looked like he'd figured it all out. Did things always go so horribly wrong as soon as they could have been fine?

"I'll talk to you soon," he said, and hung up. He straightened his tie, and fished his happy smile from somewhere deep down in his bag. This was what he was supposed to be excited for. This was his night. His reward for hours and hours and hours of work. His ticket to his future, to this little glimpse into days that were to come.

He didn't want this future anymore, this future he'd worked so hard for, this future he'd given himself up for. He closed his eyes, and put himself aside. Perhaps the champagne would fix it. Perhaps the happy drunk buzz could distract him, could put that charm back on, just like the lost childhood Christmas charm would come back after two cups of mulled wine. Or three.

Perhaps. But he doubted it. The prickly, golden liquid tasted bitter as poison to him nowadays.

 

**# twenty-second of december**

 

The train station was packed. It buzzed with holiday cheer. Truly, Christmas had come; decorations and candles were lit in every window, outside every shop, and snow fell in heavy flakes in the streets.

Phil pushed through the crowd. He'd left his flat early, aching to get home, but he'd had trouble navigating through the slippery streets of London, and through the thick crowds at the train station, despite only having a gym bag slung over his shoulder and a backpack filled to the brim on his back instead   of a large suitcase that he would have to trail behind him. Now, he was just in time for his train home.

He hadn't seen Dan since the last night in the boy’s bed; the present he'd found in today's parcel had been the second sock. Phil wore them now, although his feet boiled in boots that were too small and too warm with the extra woollen layer. He couldn't have cared less. In his pocket, he clutched his phone.

The air seemed to stand still amongst the clouds. There wasn't a lot of oxygen available, but Phil's lungs still weren't quite up to par anyways. He barely noticed the difference.

This was the last time he'd leave London before his graduation. This was the last time he'd go home an unfree man.

Excitement bubbled up somewhere deep inside of him. It was Christmas. It was time to pull those old memories up, to let himself fall into the welcoming arms of his family.

A sudden pang of guilt reminded him that Dan wasn't going home. Dan had wanted to escape the memory of his family when he’d gone to uni. Dan had been kicked out from home. He had nowhere to go back to.

Phil itched to call him, itched to pull his phone out as he found his platform, itched to find Dan's contact as he searched for his seat, itched to press the button to call as he put his large bag away.

But the train was as packed as the station had been; there were people everywhere. Phil rested his head against the window, and allowed himself to breathe.

Maybe there was a chance for him still. Maybe there was a chance all of this could be set right again. Maybe there was a chance for him to forgive himself, eventually. Maybe there was a chance for him and Dan, for Dan and him. Maybe there was a chance for them not to be criminals, scum. They’d have to drop from the highest step of the ladder. They might break their legs, and worse, on their way down. Phil wasn’t sure, still wasn’t sure, if it was all worth it. He’d come so far.

His breath fogged up the window. Outside, it snowed from dark clouds that hung low. Slowly, slowly, the world became covered in white. Maybe that could happen to Phil, too. Until he could deal with the ugliness beneath, he'd let it snow.

Trains were magnificent. Ever-moving, moving away, Phil could finally let himself relax.

 

**# twenty-third of december**

 

"Phil, will you not help your brother with the tree? Don't you want it to look nice?" Phil's mother called from the bottom of the stairs. Phil rolled his eyes, and shielded his phone with his hand.

"Can't Cornelia help?" he shouted back. "She knows how to do that stuff! Their flat looks fine, and it’s not because of Martyn!"

"Thanks, you dickhead" Martyn shouted.

"You're welcome!" Phil shut his door again. His childhood bedroom was small, a cupboard rather than an actual room. Tall as he was now, his head came close to the ceiling if he stood upright. But he'd grown up in here. His posters were still up on the walls, and the desk's drawers were stuffed with his old schoolwork. A collection of dusty figurines sat on the tiny windowsill. He was far too grown up for this space now, this house, this little Northern town. He'd made himself lose most of his Northern accent in exchange for a posh London one. It did better in high society. He hated it, too. He held the phone back up to his ear.

"I'm back."

"I figured," Dan said. "Since, you know, you aren't shouting my ear off anymore."

"Hey," Phil said indignantly. "It's Christmas-Eve-Eve, that's a big deal for some people. I tried-"

"All good," Dan said. "Will you open your calendar? I don't want to keep you from your family much longer. They deserve to see you more than I do, and you deserve to see them. When was the last time you went home? Summer?"

"For a few days in summer, yes."

Phil fumbled for the next to last present on the string. Again, it was small, and thin; folded paper. Phil tucked his phone between his shoulder and ear to unfold it with care.

"That's a long time ago," Dan said.

Phil's reply got stuck in his throat.

"Phil?" Dan asked.

The present was a drawing; a pencil sketch of Phil himself, much more handsome than he would ever be, but still undoubtedly him. Phil sucked in a sharp breath.

"What's up?" Dan asked. "Are you okay?"

"Dan," Phil managed. "That's beautiful."

"Oh," Dan said. "Oh. That's nothing. Just- I did that in a lecture, just for fun. Couldn't get you off my mind."

Phil still struggled, now and again, to connect this blunt, loud Dan to the quiet, fragile boy that he knew Dan to be, too, the boy who would sniffle and cry on the phone, who could never breathe quite right. Dan was both, obviously. Dan was many things, and Phil was fairly sure that there was not a side to him that he wouldn't like. He blushed at the thought, and reminded himself it was okay. He was allowed to do this. He could allow himself to feel.

Just a job. Not an ancient family rivalry. Not a religion. And if it were, then it'd be a shitty one, one that preached hate and adversity, one in which the members prayed to nothing but power and wealth, where violence was a prayer and dishonesty was a virtue.

"I think it's lovely," he insisted. His mother called again from downstairs, something about trees and mince pies that were fresh out of the oven. Quickly, Phil stuffed the drawing into his bedside table.

"Thanks," Dan said, voice low, hesitant. It barely carried over to Phil. Dan cleared his throat before he went on. "Anyway, I've got to go. I'm getting extra money for jobs done on Christmas. And Zayan promised me he'd sneak some Christmas pudding away. The best bits. Have fun with your family."

"I'll call you soon," Phil promised.

He hung up, and went downstairs to stuff his face with mince pies until he'd feel sick from them, until he could forget the dread that always lingered at the corners of his peripheral vision and threatened to envelope him even here, even at home, where he'd be defenceless. His gun lay tucked under his mattress.

 

**# twenty-fourth of december**

 

On Christmas Eve, Phil woke up to snow outside his window and a text message from Dan on his phone. It was eleven am. He hadn't slept for this long in months, not since he'd last been here. He couldn't remember a single one of his dreams.

He slipped his glasses on from his bedside table, and clicked on the notification that informed him of a new text.

'open your present' it said. Nothing else.

Faintly, Phil heard people move around downstairs, from the kitchen to the living room, from the living room to the kitchen. A toilet was flushed somewhere, and someone cursed as they stumbled over something. Still groggy, Phil reached for his advent calendar.

The last present was tiny, wrapped in too much colourful paper and sealed with too much sticky tape. It took Phil a while to get to the small piece of paper inside.

It was only folded once.

'THE BARN', read Phil. He knew what barn Dan meant immediately. It had stood empty for years, deserted by all but the graffiti artists of the town. No-one quite knew who it belonged to anymore. Phil had been a very small child when it had last been filled with large stacks of hay, and Phil was getting old. Now, it was said to be haunted. Cracks in the walls would sometimes gleam at night. Phil suspected that teenagers fooling around were more likely to be the source of this than ghosts, and he should know, he'd been one of those teenagers, but one could never be certain.

This was the barn Dad had to mean. But how would the boy know of it? What would Phil find there?

He hurried to get ready. It was hard to shake an uneasy hunch. A bout of fear that followed him the way a shadow did. Before he left, he slipped his gun into his jacket. The familiar weight calmed him, although it was all wrong to carry the weapon in his childhood home, to carry it past his father, who was making some pie or another in the kitchen, and to carry it past his mother, who was hoovering the needles around the tree. It felt all wrong. Nothing was supposed to happen here, in his safe place, where his memories hadn't yet been touched or tainted. Now, he walked with a gun, and it was as if he were walking through one wall of glass after the other, walls he had erected carefully and walls that now burst at the impact with his skin. Shards splattered everywhere. He walked on.

"Good morning," he called. "I'm going for a quick walk. Love you, be right back!"

"I didn't know you were up," his mother exclaimed.

"Don't you want coffee?" his father asked, waving a pot of it around. But Phil already had one foot out of the door.

The barn wasn't far. The air was biting. Phil should have thought to put on gloves, or a scarf. Snowflakes settled on his new beanie.

He pleaded with himself to stay calm, but it was hard to do when this all felt like he'd stumbled into a reality just a few inches to the right of his own, with everything just a little out of place. There were no cars in the streets. All windows were lit. Snow fell heavily. Phil hurried on through the winter scenery that suddenly seemed so desolate. His gun weighed cold in his hand, but he couldn't bring himself to let go of it.

The barn towered over a snow-covered field, dark and looming. Phil swallowed hard. His boots were wet, and so were his socks. He barely felt his frozen toes or fingers, but his heart raced more with every second.

The large wooden door creaked open. Phil had to lean against it with his entire weight before it would budge, and when it did, he stumbled inside.

On the other side of the barn stood Dan. He wore only a t-shirt and baggy sweatpants. His lips were red with blood. They had to be blue underneath, blue like his skin looked from afar, blue like ice. His eyes were opened wide in panic.

Phil froze.

Behind Dan, with a knife held to the shaking boy's throat, was Kyle.

"Lester," he said.

"Kevold," Phil said. "Let him go."

"I heard your loyalties were compromised," Kyle smirked. "There’s been talk of it. But now I see how, and it’s better than I imagined. Scandalous, really. Who would have thought. The Insomniac’s prodigy boy."

"Kyle," Phil said, louder. "Let him go."

Dan closed his eyes.

It hadn't been supposed to come to this.

Phil stepped forward. In his pocket, his fingers found the trigger.

Fuck his future, this life he didn't want anymore. Fuck it all. He'd shoot Kyle if it meant saving Dan. He'd blow up both coffeeshops if it meant he could escape from the hell, and Dan could be with him, if they could be safe. He’d shoot himself if nothing worked.

"Let him go," he said, a third time, and watched Dan flinch at the sound of his voice. He wouldn’t have recognized it for his own, hadn’t he seen the clouds of breath leave his mouth with each spat out word. It was too harsh, too cold, and as it echoed through the empty barn, he wanted it all to be over.

Phil lunged forward, and ran.

Dan screamed.

And three shots rang out.

 

**# epilogue**

 

**Two Dead On Christmas**

On Christmas Eve, two young men were found dead in the deserted barn just outside the east of Rossendale. They were discovered by a young man visiting town from London, who wishes to remain anonymous to the press. According to police records, he was walking his dog when he heard gunshots, and rushed to help. By the time he got to the assumed crime scene, it was too late. A second eyewitness confirmed that the victims were alone in the barn at the time of death.

They have been identified as Daniel Howell, nineteen, and Philip Lester, twenty-two. Both were students at the  The local church will include a minute of silence for them in today's Christmas service. The investigation into the case is still ongoing. If anyone has information regarding the case, please call the following number...

**Author's Note:**

> did you like it? i hope you did! congratulations for getting to the end. come shout at me in the comments!  
> happy holidays to those of you that consider this time a holiday, and happy non-holidays to everyone else. family can be stressful, and if you're actually reading this around christmas, i hope you got a little break from all the nagging and the bragging and all the general hassle of families coming together - or otherwise, i hope you aren't lonely in these dark times.


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